


hangover breath

by thefrictioninyourjeans



Category: Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2015-11-03
Packaged: 2018-04-29 18:17:36
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 50,139
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5137781
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thefrictioninyourjeans/pseuds/thefrictioninyourjeans
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Noa gets kicked out by her family on her 16th birthday with no explanation other than a letter from her mother. She falls asleep in a bus station and wakes up in the town she meant to end up in. </p><p>What is going on? Why was she kicked out? Will she ever read her mother's letter?</p><p>Édith was kicked out, too, but she's happier gone. When the two keep running into each other, will they agree with the forces of fate that seem to be pushing them every which way?</p><p>A novel about witches and friendship and identity.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hangover breath

**Author's Note:**

> this is my (completely unedited lmao) nanowrimo novel 2015. it's kind of a mess but it means the world 2 me and if you read it i'd be amazed!!!!

PROLOGUE: THE DIARY  
I was born during a lunar eclipse, on a Thursday afternoon in November. My abuela called it an auspicious birth, said I was destined for great things. My mother called it two weeks late, painful, and said that my abuela was a superstitious old lady. My mother was pretty much correct, but then she usually is. Abuela asks her a lot, makes a soft noise of irritation, shakes her head and wonders aloud if she ever tires of being right. Arguing isn’t an occasional issue in my family, it’s a sport, and we all play for blood. Every family party, they rehash the same debates: the best characters in Law & Order, whether telenovelas are worth watching, why they salt the roads. The niños hide under the big dining-room table and play with Abuela’s porcelain figurines and old school photos in heavy frames. We used to think that their fights were real, that every time they screamed across the living room we should be worried. Now, my oldest cousins join in, holding their own and raising their voices to be heard over the Gangster movies my Grandfather watches. He insists we aren’t to call him Abuelo, says that he’s fought hard enough to have a place in this country, that he’s not going to be a fucking beaner no more. We speak English in his presence. I am glad for the opportunity, my Spanish embarrassingly rusty, as usual.  
We live in Wisconsin. I fight hard to keep the accent out of my words, knowing that if I go anywhere but this godforsaken town, the almost-but-not-quite-Canadian syllables will begin to sound like a parody of themselves. I keep the Spanish out of my voice, too. Bad enough I got my Mother’s dark skin, her heavy hair that never hangs just right, her dark eyes. My little sister takes after my father: she walks around like she owns the room, and all eyes are on her. She gets the Latina curves and the gringa hair, mouth, eyes. She’s got my mother’s accent, but on her it’s endearing where on me it sounds dirty.  
We live with my mother. My father turns up every so often, with Christmas gifts and soft hugs and loud apologies for being late to dinner, as usual. He holds his own in arguments and makes my mom laugh until she cries and gives my sister just the dress she was looking for. He has no goddamn idea what to do with me. He doesn’t know what to do with my introversion or how quiet I am or the fact that I never ask for anything for my birthday. This year, he’s chosen to show his love with some new, probably expensive makeup. My sister will probably look great in it. She always steals it from my dresser if I don’t give it to her, anyway. In a big family, it’s pretty easy to disappear. I used to love my birthday because it was the one day of the year when everyone was forced to pay attention to me by default. In the past couple of years, though, I’ve found that I much rather go to Rocky Horror with my friends. We went last Friday, drove a couple towns over to the artsy movie theatre that shows way too much Woody Allen for any of our tastes. We get dressed up and play at adulthood, getting dinner at a shitty café-turned-bar-after-seven-pm. It was significantly less cool when our parents had to drive us. From long tradition, we’ve found the best way to sneak into the theatre through the back entrance, the places with the cheapest foods, the stores that will sell us a six-pack of shitty beer. We’d have a can each and pretend the next morning that we were too drunk to remember anything. Hangover breath didn’t taste like growing up this year. It tasted like hangover breath.  
It was still a nice night. Today is my actual, real birthday. It falls on a Saturday this year. My whole family is here, all the tías ready to give me my birthday pinches and tíos ready to use the night as an excuse to drink, as if they needed one. And my father is here, whispering to my mother just loud enough so it bothers me and just soft enough so I can’t hear. We haven’t seen him in a while, maybe since August or so. Every time he turns up again, I can’t help but be frustrated. We see him once every few months, he stays long enough to put my mother in a great mood and make my sister come and ask me if I think it’s for good this time, and then he leaves. He must have a job, or how can he afford to buy us the gifts he inevitably turns up with? I just want a little bit of stability. Either way, my mother told me earlier that they had something important to talk to me about. I swear to every single god anyone has ever believed in, if they decide that he’s going to move in, or even be around more than he is, I might cry. And I know, I said I wanted stability, but I don’t know how I’ll possibly be able to trust that everyday he’s here won’t be his last one.  
\--------  
I don’t know how to feel about anything. What they told me sounded so incredible that I don’t really want to believe it. I don’t think that the way everything turned out was quite what they had in mind. The whole family sat down to eat dinner, like usual. We clustered in the living room, on the couches and chairs, around the TV, and watched Saturday Night Live, and even if it’s never as funny as I remember it being as a kid, it was normal and good. We had cake. The relatives left around midnight. Normally, my mother and I would clean the kitchen and then pass out. This year, something I couldn’t quite pinpoint seemed off. My extended family hugged me goodbye, even the tíos who normally wouldn’t come near me. Once everyone was gone, my parents sat me down. My mother looked worried, in a way a bit different from her normal, everyday, low-level stress. She talked around her point for a bit, before my father cut her off.  
“We need you to leave for a while.”  
“What do you mean, you need me to leave?” I didn’t know how to react. This had to be a joke. He doesn’t get to say shit about other people needing to leave, not when he refuses to stick around for more than a week. He doesn’t get to say shit about me. I looked up and realized I had said all of that out loud. God damn it.  
“Don’t take the lord’s name in vain, Noa.” Mama pinched the bridge of her nose in irritation.  
“Why do you want me to leave?” I didn’t mean for it to sound as pathetic as it probably did. I could feel a lump in my throat and my heart racing and I did the only thing I could think of to do. I got up and went to my room. I stopped by the storage closet to grab the biggest suitcase I could find. I grabbed clothes at random, stuffing in everything I could find. They don’t want me? Fine. I know I need them, I know I have nowhere to go, I know that everything in my body is screaming that this is a terrible idea and that I don’t deserve this, but I don’t know how to end this sentence. When you picture a teenager getting kicked out of their home, you don’t imagine a quiet conversation and a cordial goodbye. I don’t know why they were so calm, so quiet. I tried to mirror them as I left, dragging my bag behind me. My mother pressed an envelope into my hand, like a scene out of a goddamn movie. I think she wanted to say something, but I didn’t really want to hear a goddamn thing from her. If she won’t respect me enough to tell me why I suddenly can’t live in my home anymore, I don’t see a single reason why I should have to listen to anything she says. I took her letter, or whatever it was, and dragged my suitcase the 2 miles or so to the Greyhound station. It’s 3 in the morning. I don’t know when I’m going to open the letter. I don’t know where I’m going to go. I bought a ticket to Milwaukee. The bus won’t come for a few hours and the lady I bought the ticket from is glaring at me, so maybe I shouldn’t act on my idea to sleep on this bench.  
It’s freezing in this building. I’m struggling to keep my hands warm even in thick gloves, counting myself lucky that I managed to grab my favorite winter coat; glad it was on the floor of my room instead of in the hall closet. The bus station really isn’t much more than a couple of benches in front of a ticket window. It’s shoved between a Wendy’s and a Claire’s accessories, the same one I used to beg my mom to take me to a few years ago. I get up to press my nose against the glass like I did in middle school, look at the piercing station where I got my ears pierced for the first time, before they got horribly infected and we had to take them out and go to a doctor for antibiotics. I look at the walls lined with cheap accessories and neon hairbands and sparkly eye shadow until my breath has fogged up the glass and I’m crying too hard to really see anything, anyway. Maybe everything will look better in the morning, when I wake up from sleeping on a bench. Probably not. I think that the best I can hope for at the moment is that nobody steals my suitcase in my sleep and that I don’t miss my bus. I don’t want to leave.  
I don’t know where I can go. But I don’t see a way to stay, either.  
\------  
I woke up in Milwaukee. Still on a bench, though, outside another Greyhound station. All suburbs look the same, anyway.  
But- Milwaukee. I thought I missed the bus, thought I was still in the same place. No. I woke up 50 miles from where I started, on a different bus in a different city. I don’t remember getting on the bus, or taking a ride. I checked the clock. It’s about six, now. I think I woke up because I was so cold. One of my gloves is missing. I could understand, maybe, stealing from somebody sleeping on a bench. But a single glove? That seems a bit strange to me. The more pressing matter, though, is how I got here. I swear I never woke up. I need 12 coffees and a plan for what I’m doing with my life. In retrospect, I should have called a friend. My phone is missing, or maybe I didn’t bring it with me. There has to be a coffee shop within walking distance. I probably have at least a couple dollars to my name. Maybe I can find a way to look up a shelter or some such. All I need is somewhere to go. 

PART ONE: THE LETTER

Chapter One: Noa  
There is a girl, sitting in a Starbucks, crying into the least expensive drink that she could find. She is tucked tightly into the chair, leaning in on herself so you can’t see any of her details, just a blurry outline of puffy winter coat and nose dripping and some loose change on the table. She’s got a beat up suitcase, dark red and nondescript, tucked under the table, between her knees. She blows her nose into a napkin and pulls out an envelope, setting it on the table in front of her. It’s a smallish envelope, dark pink with a white rectangle in the center for an address, probably more decorative than functional. It looks slightly overfilled, a bit damp from having been dropped in the snow, maybe, or cried on. The girl, Noa, looks at it like it’s a problem. For her, it is.  
She opens it. 

Querida Noa,  
I don’t know how things have turned out, as I’m writing this, but by the time that you read this, you, of course, will. I cannot apologize for anything that I have said, knowing that I have not said it yet. I will say that I am sorry for any pain that this will inevitably cause you.  
I remember how it felt. It hurt me in the same way. You should know that the pain you are feeling is not unique to you. It is a family tradition, to have every generation cause the next a little pain. It will maybe push you further than you could otherwise go. It will maybe not. I have no way of knowing. What happens now is up to you.  
This practice is a family tradition, passed from mother to daughter, older than any one of our memories can go. Well, it was thirteen until nobody returned. Your I-don’t-know-how-many-greats grandmother chose to change it to sixteen. I think it’s a good time. You’re still young enough to improvise, young enough to still be growing, to still understand that you have room to grow. You should never be too set in your ways, mija. This trip will prevent that, I hope.  
There are some rules to this, like every tradition. I do not have any way of ensuring that you follow many of these. I can only ask that you respect those who have come before enough to trust their judgment.  
1\. You may not return for one full year.  
2\. During this year, you may not contact any members of your family, or previous acquaintances. You will be lonely. Loneliness can be helpful.  
3\. You may not tell anyone outside of your family about the discoveries you make on this trip. They will not believe you.  
4\. You must come back home again.  
Your abuela called your birth auspicious. She wasn’t wrong, but in our family auspicious births have been normal for far too long. I’ve always taught you that family is important, that being a mother is the highest calling anyone might have. Being a daughter is a high calling too. For generations, the eldest daughter of a mother from our line has been able to do things without intention. Perhaps you have seen this already, but they used to call us brujas. We lived in Oaxaca, in the mountains, not quite close enough to any village to say we lived there. They drove us out, calling us criminals, and we fled as far as we could go, up to America where I was born, and you too.  
You used to ask about the altar in your abuela’s house. We told you it was to the Virgin Mary, always. Forgive us the lie, it was a small one, especially compared to all the others. Abuela worships la Santa Muerte, but you know that I worship nothing. This is for you to choose. Regardless of what you choose, you cannot control your powers, nor can you remove or ignore them.  
You will have a specialty that should become apparent in the next year. This will come naturally. Everything else will come at a price. You must learn to control every emotion you have, every step you take, or you will lose what you have for powers that you do not need. If you find something important missing, know that you have not misplaced it, but it has been taken in payment for something you may not be aware of.  
When I was your age, my mother gave me a similar letter, but with only the rules. She did not tell me why I had to stay away. I will not tell you. I will tell you that it will make you better at whatever you end up being best at.  
Your grandmother can make anyone believe anything. She passed that on to me, to my brothers, in a lesser sense. She wins arguments for a reason. I know that you don’t like to hear us fight, but in the end abuela always wins. There’s no point in starting, when the end is already told, a hundred times over. We did not get visas, nor passports, coming into this country. She told them to let us through. They let us through.  
You have seen me in the kitchen for more time than you have seen me out, I’m sure. I don’t use what I can do very much. I don’t like to cheat at anything, and I hope that you don’t either. Perhaps I have slipped some luck in your hot chocolate when you are particularly nervous about a test. And my favorite drinks, the ones that you will try when you come home, they have a hint of calm, or warmth in the winter.  
When you come home, I will show you how to grow herbs. When you come home, I will hold on to you while you tell me stories of the people you met. When you come home, I will love you enough for all the days soon when you will feel as if I do not.

Come home soon, mija.  
Mami.

The girl, Noa, she mouths her mother’s goodbye softly and brushes her tears off of her face. She blows her nose, and finishes looking through the envelope, finding a short list of things: a plane ticket voucher; somewhere around a thousand euros; two twenty dollar bills; a note from her little sister that reads You’ll probably be fine. Love You.; a note from her grandmother that reads Te amo más todo. Cuidate.; and a credit card with a post-it note stating in block letters that it is only to be used in extreme cases.  
Noa finishes her coffee and tucks the contents back in the small pink envelope. She gets up, places her cup carefully in the garbage can as if not to disturb the rest of the contents, and asks a barista where the nearest bus stop might happen to be. She walks out the door, two blocks straight, one to the left. She pulls the strings tighter on her hoodie and shoves her single glove onto her hand. She has a bus to catch, three transfers to manage, a suitcase to drag, and hopefully, a destination in mind.

Chapter Two: Édith  
There is a place outside her apartment where 3 streets meet in a jumble of uneven paving stones and gawking tourists. The fruit vendor overturned his cart early this morning. He is trying to pretend that neither his apples nor his pride are bruised in the least as he convinces the irritated grandmother that yes, his produce is organic and no, she does not need to inspect it. The same girl with the dyed-black hair and messy blonde roots is sitting out side at the café, smoking, drinking her espresso, smudging her lipstick, generally trying to look like the poster for 1920s Paris as she gets her morning lung pollution and caffeine hit. It’s not raining, for once, an unusual sight for mid-November Paris. Édith almost wishes it was, wishes that she had an excuse to stay inside, drink tea and get lost in a novel that she’s probably read too many times already.  
She flicks a drop of loneliness out of the window, hoping it hits a poet who might write the next best collection, one she could add to her shelf, one she could revisit, one that would be as worn as the Sylvia Plath, or the Margaret Attwood.  
As a matter of fact, her loneliness hits a businessman. He misses his daughter, away at school. He cannot focus for the rest of the day.  
Nor can Édith, for that matter. She has work. She always has work.  
Édith dropped out of school on a Tuesday. She remembers this, in particular, because it was the day that she started a new journal, and it says at the top of the page. They told her, you miss another day of school and you shouldn’t bother to come back. She was on her way, when she passed a park, and she had a maths test, or she could sketch the ducks, and really there was not a choice to be made. The ducks fill the first fourth pages in her journal. The letter of expulsion fills the fifth. The sixth, her father’s letter, informing her calmly that he will no longer be paying her rent. Seventeen years old and mostly-alone, in a way that she’s pretty much okay with. Her after-school job became her full-time one. Her boss didn’t ask too much about it.  
Her life goes on, as life tends to do. She perfects her brew of discontentment and poisons rude costumer’s days. She pours cheap wine into expensive bottles. She stops calling her old friends. They start calling her a witch behind her back. She doesn’t think that they mean it in the way that it’s true.  
Today, life takes precedence over the silence that fills her days off and the loneliness that is beginning to seep into her lungs. She showers and walks the kilometer or so to the small café where she works for too long every day, shoves her hair up into a greasy ponytail and checks her lipstick in her shop-window reflection on the way. On the walk, she tripped over the paving stone that she tripped over yesterday, and the day before, because she is a creature of habit. The shop is stifling compared to the chill outside, but once she has her scarf unwound and coat hung up on the little rack by the door and is standing behind the counter, the temperature feels just about right.  
Lise is working today, and she’s not Édith’s favourite, with her constant phone calls to her boyfriend, or her mother, and her clattering bracelets, and the way that she always makes Édith take the difficult costumers. Like now.  
“Éeeeedith.” Lise calls across the entire two feet that divide them, “Do you speak English? This American needs help and I took German in school.”  
“Sure, Lise.” She replies, ready to get it over with. Édith, in fact, did not take English either. She took Spanish, but enough time with Lise forcing you to take all English-speaking customers and she’s managed to pick up enough to take the order and remind them that this is not a Starbucks and they don’t sell Frappuccinos. She smiles at the customer, a short, irritated girl. “May I take your order, please?”  
The girl smiles tightly, “Small vanilla latte, please.”  
Édith does her best not to roll her eyes at this. Americans and their incessant flavoured drinks. “One moment, please.”  
Lise has, shockingly, gone on break. She makes the drink as quickly as possible and hopes that the girl won’t ask her any questions about good places in the general area.  
“Do you know of any hostels around here?” The girl asks, in passable French.  
“You speak French?”  
“Not very well.”  
“Well enough. I’m Édith.”  
“Noa. Do you want to answer my question?” Édith can’t do anything but stare. Who the hell does this girl think she is?  
This girl, this Noa, she puts down her money and grabs her change and drink and retreats to a back corner of the shop, glaring a bit. Édith wonders why until she realizes that she’s been staring for far longer than the socially acceptable amount of time. She decides that as revenge, if Noa comes back for another drink, she’ll slip some of her new spite brew into it. Just to see if it works, right?

Chapter 3: Édith  
Édith’s powers came down from her father’s side. She was the first-born son, according to biology, or something. She’s never been a goddamn son. So she got the traditional family powers, or whatever. And it’s considered best practice in sorcerer families, or whatever you want to call it (she’s refused to call it wizarding families since she found out. Her father might call it that, but it’s far too Harry Potter for her tastes and always will be.} to get rid of your child on their sixteenth birthday for a year, allowing them to make their own way in the discovery of their powers.  
Magical puberty is a not-particularly-pleasant process. Things happen that you can’t control. You don’t have parents around to ask how to stop everything you own from disappearing in exchange for waking up with your homework done or dinner appearing in front of you.  
Édith was more and less lucky than most, she guesses. Your parents tell you when they make you leave that you aren’t meant to be contacting anyone that you’ve had previous contact with, so there isn’t a support network. There’s nobody to ask about how they managed, about where they stayed, about how they avoided getting mugged, or sleeping on the street. All you have is, well, you. Édith had her father’s money, an account on a bankcard that kept her in cash for a down payment on an apartment, in groceries, in new clothes from her favorite street stalls and secondhand shops. She had the knowledge of a city that only truly comes from being born and raised there, and a love of getting lost. She had a job, already, after school at a coffee shop tucked in between a bookshop and a restaurant, looking over the Seine at the Cathedral.  
She had more than she needed.  
Her father cut her off six months after her birthday. This, he said through a note, was not a family tradition. He informed her that she had been abusing her time away and allowing herself to fall into sin. When she left, her father had not been a religious man. She wondered what had changed, and skipped a day of school to ask for longer shifts. She did not move.  
On her sixteenth birthday, she had told her father that she didn’t want to be a boy any longer, that she hadn’t been for a long time. He told her that his news to her would be easier for him to say, now.  
He said to her, “Léo, I want you to leave. This was not to be my choice, but now I see that I would be asking you to leave anyway. As my father did for me, I will be financing you. You will come back after one year. Today is the day that your powers will begin to emerge, as mine did. This money is to give you a space in which you might allow that to happen. You will not leave this city. You will not leave school. I have arranged a transfer, beginning next week. You will not contact me, nor anyone else you know. You will get all of this nonsense out of your system, and return to me as the bright young man that I know you are.”  
And Édith wanted to scream. You know nothing, you know nothing, you are a poor excuse for a father and a man. She wanted to throw his own words back in his face, remind him of every time that he told her to be kind, to be good. Remind him of every time he clicked his tongue at the news and turned to her, giving her a gentle reminder that every human being is deserving of respect. What about me? Am I not deserving of your respect? Will I always just be a faggot in your eyes, your son in a dress, the disappointment to the family that you won’t mention at dinner parties? I will not be your son anymore. I will be your daughter, or I will be nothing to you.  
She looked hard at the ground. Boys don’t cry in this family, she reminded herself. That’s all they’ll ever see you as. She took the bank card and retreated to her room, dragged a duffel bag out from under her bed and filling it with the books she just couldn’t leave behind. She pulled up her mattress to grab the comfy leggings she wore when her dad was away, the two H&M skirts that never fit quite right because she never had the courage to try them on before buying them.  
It felt like running away, still feels like it if she looks back. Her father didn’t bother to say goodbye. It was late night, maybe, or early morning. She walked until it was light out and her feet were numb. She walked until the banks were open. She walked until the world was caught up with how awake she was, until the world was ready to let her start over.  
When she walked into her apartment for the first time, it felt like she was getting away with something. When she bought a dress, and makeup, it felt like getting away with something. It also felt wrong. She wears big jackets and soft leggings and dark lipsticks and feeds the ducks on her lunch break until the pond freezes over. It’s been a year and a half, maybe.  
She’s okay.  
Édith found a forum one night, after a string of increasingly specific Google searches to find other people like her. She skimmed page after page, and found that the best thing to do was to do things that you have a strong urge towards. The next week, she passed a farmer’s market and left with almost too many herb seedlings to carry. She ground mint and dried sage and let words come out of her in languages she’d never heard before, ones that sounded cut-up in her mouth, like the German tourists that shout to each other in the streets, or the Chinese group that she saw once, on a school trip to Versailles, following a guide who shrieked into a microphone about the drapery.  
She wrote down ever mixture that she made, and sampled them in the smallest doses she could manage. The first time that she managed to get one right, she didn’t actually know it. It wasn’t an aha moment because she didn’t know that it had affected her until she realized that for the first time in months she was just, well, calm. She wasn’t thinking about bills to pay or whether somebody would break into her apartment or if she could get more hours of work without dropping out of school. She was happy.  
She put the rest in a customer’s drink. This was probably not the best route, in a moral sense, at least, but when the customer grinned immediately, she knew what she had made.  
Literal happiness. She had brewed happiness.  
Fuck.  
Maybe having powers wasn’t as bad as she expected it to be.

Chapter 4: Noa  
The blog she found waxed poetic about this bookstore, the one that lets people stay there for free. Why not, right? The pictures showed a sunny, comfortable place with walls lined in books, hipsters playing piano, and a cat next to a vase of flowers. It looked pretty ideal from what Noa could see.  
The outside is a bit more dilapidated than expected. She shivers, thinking of her abuela. Whenever you get the shivers, she says that somebody is walking over your grave. Noa pushes the thought out of her mind, and the door open, dimly aware of a bell tinkling. The shop has an uneven stone floor, with bookshelves immediately surrounding you from floor to ceiling. There’s a girl with dreads piled on her head and what seems to be maybe four scarves around her neck chewing gum and idly reading at the register. She barely looks up, just motions at Noa to close the door.  
“You’ll let all the heat out,” she calls out in French, and repeats herself in English, for good measure. Noa rushes to get the door shut completely, an irritating process as the door fights back, and walks past the desk into the bowels of the shop.  
The walls seem to curve out, slightly, under the weight of the ceiling. It’s probably not the most books in one place that Noa’s ever seen, but it certainly feels that way. It’s almost a bit claustrophobic, with the overstuffed couch and armchair without legs sitting in a corner. A cat jumps down right in front of her nose, and she jumps.  
Every possible surface is covered in books: old, new, in every color, size, and subject. She heads over to the corner, to go up the worn metal spiral staircase to the second level, where she read that the owner is usually to be found.  
There are more people up here: a guy with an incredible beard only rivaled by his massive curly grey Afro smokes a pipe: like, an actual, real pipe. He looks like a good storyteller, she thinks, and moves further into the shop. There are bunk beds, with the walls behind them covered in notes from tourists in ever language imaginable: little doodles on receipts, hearts, exclamations about how beautiful the shop is, traced baby handprints, even postcards mailed to the shop. The window is open, to let the cold air in, and it looks out over the river. The view honestly does look like it could be in a picture book. Noa hears a piano, and pokes her head into the next room.  
There is a slight blonde woman sitting at the bench of a worn out upright piano. It’s got a chunk of wood missing at one corner, and a giant scratch all down the side that faces Noa. The woman plays it beautifully, though, with her eyes closed, and her face tilted up out the window, as if to catch the light that is blocked out by the cloudy day.  
Noa wants to paint her, almost, even though she hasn’t taken art since middle school, and was never all that good at it anyway. She settles for clearing her throat, feeling bad about interrupting the woman’s recital.  
“Excuse me? Sorry, I was just wondering where I could find the owner.”  
The woman looks up, a little bit startled, and smiles. “I am she. I didn’t hear you come in, sorry. I tend to get pretty out of it when I’m playing.”  
“You play wonderfully.” Noa blurts out, and covers her face with her hands. Real smooth, Noa. Not the first impression you should give.  
“You’re too sweet. How can I help you?” The woman is visibly holding back laughter.  
What a disaster. “I was wondering how I could become a tumbleweed?”  
“I should have guessed,” the woman smiles gently, “but we don’t take minors unless it’s a special circumstance. This isn’t the right place to run away to.”  
“What if I was kicked out?” She bites her lip, hoping that this is the right thing to say.  
The blonde woman looks at her hands and seems to deflate a little bit. “We could maybe make an exception.” She gets up, and shakes Noa’s hand. “I’m Thea Daniau. Do you know the rules?”  
“No, not really. I mean, I found some stuff online or I wouldn’t be here, but I didn’t see any rules.”  
“What you saw online was probably pretty much what we define as our ‘rules’, as they’re pretty loose and haven’t really been updated since we started doing this fifty-odd years ago. You have to work in the store for at least 2 hours every day that you live here, you have to be polite to the other tumbleweeds, you have to write a little biography of yourself, and you have to read every day. You find your own food, but you’re always welcome to community dinners.”  
“Alright.” So this isn’t quite Noa’s miracle solution. Her mind races, trying to figure out how she can make her cash last long enough to eat for a year.  
“I saw your eyes when I mentioned food. If you don’t have money, you can work extra hours here to have a little money for food, or we can help you get a job elsewhere if you prefer that.”  
“Thank you so much, you don’t know how much this means to me.” Noa grins. She didn’t know what she was expecting, but somehow this brand of calm compassion was unexpected, and yet exactly what she needed. She thinks of her mother, and gets choked up, a little bit.  
Thea smiles. “Don’t worry about where you came from. You can write all of that out later. For now, you can stay here, and we’ll help you get to where you need to be. You’re far from the first, and you won’t be the last, but everyone has a place here. What’s your name?”  
“Noa.”  
“Noa who?”  
“Just Noa, I guess.”  
“Alright, Just Noa. Do you prefer top or bottom bunk?”  
Noa, inexplicably horrified at this question, bursts into tears.  
Thea, believing that a good cup of tea can fix what words can’t, bustles off to make one, and maybe look up if there are any missing American teenagers named Noa, just in case. She’s seen her share of teenagers come through, some looking for adventure, but many more having seen more hardship than anyone should have to at their age. She’s had some stay for a day and move on in the morning, or even in the middle of the night. When she was younger, she had one stay for three years, only to be gone in the morning.  
Thea knows that there’s only so much she can do. Her husband teases her about taking home every stray she finds, but they come to her and she’s never been able to turn anybody away. Besides, she never wants for sweet Christmas cards or people to work in the store. 

Chapter 5: Édith  
Getting off from work at 10 PM isn’t exactly ideal, but it is what it is, right?  
The day has dragged on for entirely too long, with a higher than normal ratio of rude customers to quiet and polite ones, including a guy who abused the free wifi for three hours to make a Skype call to his girlfriend, according to the entirely too much that Édith could hear of their conversation; a woman who brought her children and a number of their friends and thought that a tiny coffee shop would be the place to buy them lunch, including a number of hamburgers and a glass of wine for herself; and a man who spoke neither English nor French and refused to look at the menu, choosing instead to scream his order multiple times in Édith’s face, while getting progressively more irritated that she just stood there, rather than making his drink. Who knows if he even wanted a drink, when for all Édith knows, he could have been asking for directions to the nearest McDonalds.  
And then they closed, and she had to mop and sweep and wipe down the tables that were left in disaster from the horde of children and make sure everything was locked and the lights were off.  
She walked home, shivering, realizing almost immediately that she had left her coat in the store. But it’s all right. Work is over. Tomorrow she doesn’t have to go in. She can sleep in and go for a walk and maybe go to the Musée De l’Orangerie, where she hasn’t been for way too long. When she goes to bed, it’s with a rare smile on her face.

In the morning, she stretches, realizes that she forgot to take off yesterday’s makeup and it’s now smeared in heavy streaks across her pillowcase, the black mascara lines and the red smears from lipstick. She gets up and trips on a pile of dirty clothes. A side effect of living alone is that you can revel in all of the bad habits that you aren’t allowed to have when you live around other people. Édith enjoyed this at first, walking around naked after her showers and eating only ice cream and leaving her stuff in gradually increasing piles around her bed, but after around a year it just feels like a gross kind of way to live, and she tries to clean up as much as possible when she has the time and energy.  
After showering, she finds the dress that she wants to wear, the black one that makes her waist look tiny and her boxy shoulders look not quite feminine enough, but close, piled in a ball of other various items of black clothing in the corner of the living room. Upon close inspection, it has a large, smelly coffee stain from the last time she wore it. God damn it, I need to do laundry again, she thinks, exasperated that she always forgets that laundry is a necessary evil until she can’t find the one article of clothing that she really wants to wear on any given day.  
She pulls her last pair of clean jeans out of the chest of drawers, and a worn-out record store shirt that she found secondhand, or maybe used to belong to her little brother. It’s been a while since she wore it; clearly, because when she pulls it on it still smells like the detergent that the maid used to use at home, familiar in a way that only an oddly specific scent can be. It smells like citrus and some sort of perfume, maybe, and soap and starch and laundry smells, and it isn’t bad but it isn’t great, either.  
It’s definitely clean, though, so she pulls it on and does her best to put any thought of home out of her mind entirely. She spends less time than usual doing her makeup, knowing that nobody will look at her in public unless she gives them a reason, and it’s easier to just get lost in the museum crowd.  
She grabs her jacket, which isn’t quite warm enough for the weather, an umbrella, her wallet and cigarettes, and gets out of her building before she realizes that she forgot her lighter. Turning to a wall, she lights one with the tip of her finger, knowing that one will disappear out of the packet in exchange for the magic that wasn’t her particular brand.  
She smokes it down as far as it will go on the way to the Metro, and rides it in silence, staring at the shoes of the other passengers all the way to her stop. There are the businessmen with their neatly tailored grey hems and soft leather shoes, some of them wearing sneakers for the commute; the businesswomen in their pointy heels, the sounds of which terrified her growing up, knowing that they meant that grandmother was coming to visit, the schoolgirls with their sensible shoes that their mothers picked out, stark black and scuffed against their white socks. She looks at her own feet, too-thick legs covered in dark blue jeans disappearing into heavy, worn out black boots.  
She gets off the train and out into the air, happy to be what might loosely be defined as outdoors. The subway has never been her favorite, with the air seeming too heavy and too light simultaneously, never feeling quite right in her lungs.  
The museum is in the middle of a park, and the gravel paths are essentially just mush in the heavy rain. She sighs, glad that she wore her heavy boots, and trudges through the puddle. A little girl runs past her, shrieking with delight as she sheds her coat and leaps, hands-first, into a puddle. Édith watches as her nanny come running up a moment later, shrieking over the wet clothes and wetter child, who is laughing, delighted at this new game that she’s invented. The museum looms, something of an eyesore, large and grey and made of cement. Édith lingers outside for a moment, putting her ear buds in to block out the inevitable tourists, and opens the door.  
It isn’t quite as loud as usual, with a chilly November weekday hardly being prime tourist gathering time. Édith goes through security rapidly. Going to a museum every week will make you an old hat at this, she thinks idly, smiling at a security guard as she puts her bag in the metal detector tray. She heads through the massive, mostly empty foyer to the main attraction: Monet’s Water Lilies. Impressionism has never been her favorite, really, so this museum was possibly not the best choice. She likes modern art, art where you can see that whoever created it was angry or fed up or had something to say. Still, people travel thousands of miles to come here, so there must be something to it. She wants to press her hand against the painting, suddenly, to feel the soft, chalky pastels. She reaches out, and the security guard shrieks, and requests that she leave the room in favor of another section, or possibly another museum entirely. The paintings are beautiful; she’ll give him that. But they look the same as when she saw them years ago. The emotions she attached to them haven’t changed, for better or for worse. They haven’t matured. It’s still just a set of pretty pictures of purple flowers.  
She wanders downstairs; to the section of the museum that she doesn’t remember quite as well, or maybe just hasn’t visited. It houses a selection, a pamphlet politely informs her, of art spanning impressionism and it’s influence.  
She wanders past the expected paintings of girls lounged across pianos, flowers, and what have you, into a room that has what she was looking for. These paintings are completely different, a stark transformation from the pretty blues, pinks, and purples of the room before. These have harsh brushstrokes, every single time the brush touched the paper clearly reflected in the final product. They are in dark blues, greens, browns, almost ugly. This is the travelling exhibit of Picasso’s Blue Period.  
Édith smiles, feeling more at peace among the artist’s anger and pain that she ever could among the young, heavily romanticized girls. She remembers seeing these paintings for the first time in heavy coffee table books, the ones that were littered around her elementary school art room for inspiration.  
They had art class once a month, but it lasted for almost the whole day. They had one day to complete their sketch or painting or mask, and if you wanted any extra time you came back after school. Édith’s father thought that this was a waste of time, and every month he asked the school if they would be willing to put her in extra math or history classes instead. Even learning about literature would be preferable, in his eyes. He grew up in love with the arts, though he soon learned that he had very little ability. When he applied to an arts university and his portfolio was rejected, he turned to his father’s business of accounting and investments. Now, this made him money, but it also made him bitter. Édith’s mother was an artist. She had hands with long, delicate fingers, and tough callouses from the years of holding a pencil, or a paintbrush. She used to sing, and play the piano. Édith remembers the games that she came up with, and the stories that she read. Old ones, like Swiss Family Robinson, maybe. The ones with adventure were Édith’s favorites. She remembers her mother crying even better, though, and her father yelling when she kept Édith up too late to finish just one more chapter, or let her draw instead of doing the homework that she always avoided.  
She doesn’t remember the day that her mother left, but she knows what happened, pieced together from years of gossip overheard from nosy aunts, neighbors, and mothers at her school. Her father told her mother to leave, said that she wasn’t doing the best for her family, that she was going to turn Léo soft. He wasn’t wrong, really, and she was it in his eyes when she came out to him.  
She wasn’t the Léo he had cultivated, forced into the proper hobbies and the right schools. She wasn’t the Léo he wanted. He couldn’t see her as anything else. Édith wonders, now, if he called her mother, if he blamed her deep down. She wonders if he knew her phone number, if they ever talked again. Édith is on the verge of tears, in this stupid museum, surrounded by people she’s never seen before, who don’t really see her, and the last thing that she wants to do is be visible. She feels a tap on her shoulder, and whirls around.  
“The art. Is beautiful, no?”  
She stares at the squat man who has just tapped her on the shoulder as if she’s never seen another person before. He looks at her, a little bit puzzled.  
“You speak English?”  
She looks at him. “Yes, a little.”  
“Good, good,” he practically beams. “The art. It is beautiful, yes?”  
“Yes.” She nods, confused.  
“You looked overwhelmed. Sometimes I am to see the art, be also overwhelmed. I thought to speak to you, to tell you that I understand.”  
“Oh.” She says. Who is this strange little man who goes up to emotionally unstable strangers in museums and points out how beautiful the art is.  
“Picasso, he was an emotional man. You too are emotional, I see.”  
“I guess so.”  
“But he make this art, this art that make us cry still today.” He looks to the painting, and then back to Édith. “So maybe to be so emotional is not so bad, yes?” He smiles at her. “I will leave you now, to enjoy the art.” He begins to walk away, when Édith calls him back.  
“Thank you.”  
He just shrugs, and walks away, disappearing into the crowd. Édith leaves the museum, calmer than she’s been in too long, and walks along the river. It’s an all right day to be alone, especially if she might meet another nice stranger. Outside, the rain has subsided and the sun is setting. She doesn’t know where the day has gone, but she’s okay with that.  
On evenings like this one, she can almost see why so many people come to this city, why they think that they might find love. She can taste the romance in the night, strong enough that she doesn’t have to bottle it herself. She walks past a mime, surrounded by a small crowd of people who probably thought that this was only something that happened in a storybook. On the lock bridge, she sees a couple writing their names on a lock they bought from a vendor. She doesn’t tell them how much they were overcharged. Édith realizes that her feet have a destination in mind, even if she really didn’t intend them to, and keeps walking to her favorite bookshop.

Chapter 6: Noa  
Noa still can’t quite manage the whole disaffected when people walk through the door type thing that the girl had when she first walked into the shop, but she’s trying. When the door opens this time, she barely manages not to look up, and instead glances at the patron through the corner of her eye. That was cool, and probably didn’t creep the person out as much as she tends to do when she stares them down. It really isn’t intentional; she just wants to notice everything that she can.  
After she was kicked out of her home, nothing feels quite real anymore. It’s hard to connect the fact that she’s in Paris, France, working a full-time job, not going to school, reading constantly, learning French, doing all of these things that she never could have dreamed of, to her real actual life as Noa. Noa who trips over her own feet every time that she has to run in PE class. Noa who goes to Rocky Horror Picture Show every year on her birthday and knows all of the times to shout along. Noa who has a little sister and a best friend and a mother who loves to cook.  
That Noa had to die when she left home, or at least when she left the country. This Noa doesn’t have a last name, doesn’t have a past, is near silent unless somebody asks her to talk. This Noa is confused. This Noa doesn’t really make sense where she is, but definitely doesn’t make sense where she used to be.  
This Noa also definitely recognizes the person who just walked into the shop. It’s the barista, the one from a week or so ago, before the first time she came to the bookstore. The one who was surprised that she spoke French.  
At least, Noa thinks that it’s the same person. She can’t quite tell if they’re a girl or a boy or even somewhere in between, like the people that she’s seen online, but they’re in a big coat that covers up defining body features, and they have a masculine face but long hair and makeup. Noa doesn’t really know what to think. She decides, why not? And calls out to the person. “Hey! Don’t I know you?”  
They turn around, face twisted in irritation over being interrupted from reading the back cover of a new release. Noa finished it yesterday and it wasn’t all that good. “Excuse me?”  
“From the coffee shop? The one where the other girl yelled at you to take my order, right?”  
“Oh.” The girl (At least that’s what Noa’s settled on for now) doesn’t look thrilled at being recognized. “Noelle, right?”  
“Noa, actually. And you’re Édith.”  
“Yes.” Noa thinks that maybe she’s just tired, and that she normally isn’t so rude. She was certainly nicer in the coffee shop, but maybe that’s just because Noa was a customer then, as opposed to some random checkout kid. She smiles at Édith.  
“I’ll let you get back to your browsing, then. Sorry to interrupt.”  
Noa thinks that she gets a hint of a smile from this, and when Édith heads into a different part of the shop, Noa doesn’t stop her. Maybe it’s a sign. As nice as everyone is here, she is by far the youngest one, and that reflects in how she’s treated. It was nice to be babied for about a day, but she quickly decided that it was much nicer to just get on with things rather than be treated like she’s a child.  
The one good thing, she supposes, other than the whole having a job and a place to sleep, is that they don’t plan to make her go back to school. Her French is passable in conversation, but would probably fall apart entirely in an academic environment.  
The only thing that she really wishes that she had is a peer group. The one perk of school, minus the (often questionable) knowledge gained, was the automatic group of friends that Noa never had too much trouble forming.  
There had never been anybody that she was so close to that she misses them now, at least not in the way that she misses her family, but it is nice to have somebody to talk to, or even to have talk at you about their crush of the week and the last movie that they saw and this new band that you just have to check out. If Édith keeps popping up in Noa’s life, then maybe she has the possibility of being a real, actual friend. She thinks that they’re close in age, at least. And now they have at least one thing to talk about: she knows that Édith loves to read. Noa finishes her shift, and her novel, without looking up when Édith leaves, tearing out of the shop as fast as her legs will carry her. She only looks up a few hours later, when she is already late in closing, her book is finished, and Thea has come back inside, looking sad. She didn’t see her leave, and she doesn’t ask what’s going on. She doesn’t think that Thea really wants to discuss it, anyway.

Chapter 7: Édith  
Édith has spent a long time honing her skills at being alone, forcing down her emotions by any means necessary, whether that be drinking them away with happiness (usually followed by an actual drink) or by ignoring them until they go away. Even though her talent is emotions, even though that’s what she knows best, she hates seeing them in herself. Being numb is easier.  
Being quiet is easier too. She was a pretty talkative kid, but once she hit middle school she stopped liking the sound of her own voice and the friends that she had and just found it easier to withdraw a little bit. This habit has served her well, making living alone the slightest bit easier than in might have been. But even when she lived at home, she was lonely. It’s not easy to never be around anyone else. Living in a house with other people always meant that there was somebody around, or coming, or going, but at least knowing that sometimes there was somebody to come home to was a comfort. She doesn’t have that.  
Seeing that girl pop up again bothered her more than it should have. She thought, maybe if she doesn’t look up when I walk in then she won’t notice me. Édith recognized her immediately, but she knew that coincidences warrant discussion and she didn’t want anything to ruin her good mood. Of course, though, the girl noticed her anyway, and after a painfully awkward exchange, Édith was able to hide in the back until she was sure that Noelle was engrossed in her book and she could sneak out. The store used to be her favorite, but after tonight, she doesn’t think that she’s going to be coming back in a long time.  
Get it together. She tells herself. It’s not that big of a deal.  
Even without Noelle there, she doesn’t need the store to complicate more. Everything changed, when she saw the woman playing the piano.  
Her mother, Thea. She hadn’t seen her mother in years, didn’t have a clue where she’d gone or even what her maiden name was so she could look her up. Her mother left her behind. She didn’t need another person in her world.  
But in every book she reads, the ones that talk about girlhood and growing up, they have the mothers there to talk to the daughters, to guide them through their stupid confusions and heartbreaks and loneliness. Even the bad ones, the ones who force their daughters into nasty marriages or outdated traditions or relive their fantasies through their children; they have love behind them. It’s warped or almost gone, but there is love.  
The movies, too, tell her that one of the essential parts of being a girl is motherhood, whether it be having a mother or being one. Édith doesn’t get either, and it kills her, just a bit. To see her mother was the last thing that she wanted or needed. She tells herself that she doesn’t need it. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t change anything, dammit.  
Besides, who knows if the woman would even recognize her, much less care, much less be the person that Édith needs to spend time with.  
Édith runs away, as fast as her legs can carry her, trying to lose herself in the heavy breaths that she releases into the cold air, the tightness in her chest and the pounding of her heart.  
It works, for a bit, and she runs the miles it takes to get her back home without ever looking up. When she does, she realizes that she’s ended up on a street she recognizes, but certainly not the street that she meant to go to. She’s one block away from her old house, on the back alley that she used to cut across to get to school faster. She remembers being warned as a kid not to stray off the path to school, and sprinting through this alley on days that she was running late, in desperate hopes that the teacher wouldn’t call her father and she wouldn’t be found out.  
He used to go to work before she woke up. That was the year after her mother left, maybe, or somewhere around that time. She shakes off the memory, shivering in the sudden cold that creeps into her bones as soon as she stopped running.  
She begins walking towards the house that she grew up in. It is tall and narrow, looking almost as if somebody has pinched the roof and pulled it up, stretching it to a sharp point. It’s a dull blue, looking less well-kept than she remembers it. The door has been repainted recently, the bright white not quite meshing with the rest of the house.  
And Édith aches. Every moment of missing her family that she stuffed down comes out at once, spreads from a pain in her sternum out through every limb until she can feel in in her fingernails, in her pinky toe, in her left knee. She wants to bang the door open, run into her father’s arms and apologize for never coming back. She wants to tell him that she’s changed, that she’s not disgusting anymore, that she can be the son that he always pushed her to be.  
She wants to have that option, to grow up to be the man that he wanted, the man that would make him happy, the man that would make him love his son.  
She wants to be his son more than she’s ever wanted anything.  
Édith steps on the first porch step, and it creaks. She remembers this, remembers being scared to step on it, scared that it would knock the house down. She remembers jumping over it every morning, just in case. She steps on it, harder, almost wishing that it would tear the whole house down.  
She almost wishes that she could tear her father down with it. She hears a laugh behind her, loud, and jumps.  
It could be the police. They love to arrest girls like her. She’s heard stories, whispered in bars and clubs, or whispers of “pretty boy” and violence that makes her stomach turn. She doesn’t know if she can run. She pulls out her lighter, thinking maybe to burn him, anything to get away, anything to keep her safe.  
She turns around.  
“BROTHER’S NAME?”  
He is stumbling, confused. “Léo?”  
“It’s Édith, now.” She wants to cry. She doesn’t want to be seen like this, confused and lonely and nostalgic and cold. Her eye makeup must be smudged, her lipstick all but gone. She doesn’t want to see him like this.  
“Édith.” He tries the name out. “You look more like a Marie to me.”  
“Could you pick a more generic name, maybe?” They are both smiling. This isn’t quite right, but it’s good. It’s okay. Édith swallows down the massive lump in her throat and fiddle with her lighter. NAME looks down and fiddles with his keys.  
“Do you want to come in, maybe?” He looks hopeful. He looks a little bit tipsy, too.  
“Can I?”  
Édith doesn’t mean for those particular words to come out. She meant to tell him thanks, nice to see you, glad to know you aren’t dead. She’s seen a ghost already today, and she doesn’t need another one coming back. But the words are out, and he has a smile so genuine that she can’t bring herself to take it back.  
“Papá’s out tonight. It’s just you and me.” At those words, Édith breaks down. In the end, he has to half-drag, half-carry her inside because she’s crying so hard that she can’t walk. She thinks about the last time he said that, and all the times before. Papá didn’t think to stay around a lot, not with a housekeeper who could do just as well as he could, if not better, or so he joked to his colleagues at dinner parties. He would go out, late on a Friday night, and they would have the house to themselves. It’s just you and me. They would give the housekeeper the night off, to go see her daughter, and take over the kitchen, making a mess, and cooking something simple. They didn’t have to worry as long as they cleaned up before their father came home.  
“L-Édith, sorry, sorry, sorry.” He looks so worried. She misses him being young. He looks a million years older than he has any right to at 16, Édith thinks. He should have been okay. He should have been given the chance. They both should have. He sits her down at the kitchen counter.  
“Where’s the housekeeper? What was her name?” Édith didn’t mean to forget, but they rotated on what was essentially a monthly basis as they constantly either irritated their father and got fired or left because he irritated them.  
“We haven’t had one in months,” NAME sighs. “The agency eventually just stopped sending them. I guess that they ran out. I make Papá’s bed and do the laundry, now.”  
“And he hasn’t noticed?”  
“He still gives me the money to pay them. For a while I didn’t feel like hiring a new one, or telling him, but it is nice to have some money.”  
“What do you do with it?”  
“I’m saving it, for now. But once I leave it’s going to be nice to have some money saved. I don’t want to be all on my own, you know.”  
He looks up, stricken, having realized too late what he’s said.  
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to say…”  
When he’s trailed off, Édith smiles. “Make me some tea and all will be forgiven.”  
“Do you still like it the same way?”  
She grins. He remembers, she thinks, and nods. “What can I say? I’m a creature of habit.”  
And it shouldn’t feel quite this easy, she thinks, coming back to where she was before. She shouldn’t feel so at home in this kitchen, more so than she’s ever felt in her apartment. She shouldn’t fall back into the same patterns so easily.  
She doesn’t want to lose this all over again.  
As NAME chatters about his latest girlfriend and how hard school is and the last movie that he watched, Édith sips her tea and smiles at him. Maybe he knows that she doesn’t want to talk about her life now. Maybe he just wants to tell her about him. Either way, she doesn’t want this night to end anytime soon.

Chapter 8: Noa  
Noa isn’t very good at falling asleep. It started with staying up here and there to finish one more thing, and then it was because she just had too much work to do, but now she can’t get her mind to slow down in between thoughts so she can get some rest.  
She can’t help but feel that she isn’t doing this quite right, the whole witch adventure type thing. Her mother obviously had a destination in mind, or she wouldn’t have given her those euros, and the plane ticket. Noa has poured over the letter hundreds of times, looking for some sort of a clue or a sign or something, at least, that can tell her what her mother wanted her to do or where she needed to go or how she was supposed to figure out what her powers are.  
Maybe her mother is wrong. Maybe she just can’t do anything special. Since that bus trip weeks ago, nothing out of the ordinary has happened, at least not in a way that can’t be explained by some sort of a coincidence. The real trouble is that Noa doesn’t know of anyone she can ask without sounding crazy. Everyone that she knows that she is allowed to talk to works at the bookstore, and if they think that she’s crazy then maybe she won’t be allowed to stay here anymore.  
She can’t let that happen. She can’t sacrifice her life here. But even if they do have any idea what she’s talking about, she still can’t help but be scared of what they’ll tell her. What if she’s just a dud? What if her mom had some mistake?  
Noa pulls out her laptop, hoping that the internet will have answers where she does not. She sits up in bed, blankets pulled around her tightly, praying that the light of her laptop won’t wake up anybody else, and opens a new tab.  
The Wi-Fi is painfully slow, and as her question loads she wants to scream because she isn’t even sure if she’s worded it properly or if there will be any answers.  
She loses herself in a string of searches, opening new tabs and letting them load, hoping and hoping that she might get an answer.  
How do I know if I’m a witch?  
This one isn’t quite right. She gets a few how-to’s that inform her how to dress in a witchy kind of style or how to become pagan  
Parents kicked me out age 16  
She’s hoping that the age isn’t a thing that’s specific to her family. This turns up resources for homeless shelters in her area and stores that hire young people. Still not quite right. Noa sighs and shoves her hair out of her face. What if there really just isn’t anything for her?  
Age 16 witch  
This seems closer, maybe, but all that comes up are the Wikipedia pages for this movie franchise and fan pages and pictures of the actresses and information about them and their personal lives. Noa remembers watching that movie. She thought it was pretty good. Not as good as Hocus Pocus, but pretty good all the same.  
Kicked out witch age 16  
This search is ugly but includes every detail that she thinks that she needs. She goes through a few more pages about the same movie as before, and then finds what she’s looking for. It’s a badly coded website, one of the ones from ages ago that just has giant blocks of obnoxiously colored text and nothing else. The title on the homepage states the purpose simply: “We are here to inform young Witches of the next steps after their parents have followed tradition and kicked them out.”  
It’s not the best title, Noa thinks. A bit clunky, maybe, but it definitely tells her the most important thing: she isn’t the only one. Somebody spent the time to make this page, knowing that this had happened to them, so she isn’t the only one.  
“Right now you probably feel as if you are the only one. If your parents did it right, they have told you not to contact them or anyone that you knew before your sixteenth birthday. They may or may not have told you why.  
This tradition dates back to days that nobody knows, but the age was changed at the various regional council meetings in the early 20th century, and varies by region but is generally 16.”  
Noa’s heart races. This is a common thing. This isn’t only in her family. There are enough people like her in the world that they have council meetings. She remembers her mother told her that her a-few-greats-grandmother had chosen to change the age. Does that mean that she was on a council of some kind? Does that mean that she held some kind of a power?  
“But we digress. This information was simply to tell you that no matter what you are feeling, generations in and out of your family have felt it before. However, you can trust that this is the best way to do things. Putting you in isolation removes the possibility that our culture will be discovered by the world because you ran your mouth to your friends. The disadvantage, of course, is that you will lack in magical training.”  
Training? Noa thinks. Is there some sort of real-life Hogwarts that I can go to? Maybe JK Rowling just knew something that everybody else didn’t.  
“There is not, in fact, any place that you can travel to give you instruction in the discovery of your powers. As far as we know, there are not any books available, either. Our website is the first list of magical powers and ways that they can manifest that has ever existed and been available to the general public.”  
She sighs. This website is sure taking a long time to praise itself rather than getting to the point. Also, no Hogwarts. It’s the disappointment she had as an eleven year old, all over again.  
“Please click here to go to a list of common powers and ways you might discover them.”  
Here we go, this seems to be where it’s going to get helpful.  
“This part of the website is under construction. Please come back soon! ☺”  
Noa doesn’t swear, she really doesn’t. She’s never seen the appeal and her mother would have killed her.  
Now, she’s seeing the appeal.  
“FUCK”  
That felt better than it should have. Only, she’s on a bottom bunk. She feels the bed above her shift.  
“Noa? Shit, dude, are you okay?” The guy above her, a twenty-something year old stoner with the grossest dreads she’s ever seen asks.  
“Yeah, sorry, just, um, stubbed my toe. Don’t worry about it.”  
“Alright, kid. Go to bed, though, it’s like 5 in the morning or whatever.”  
He’s pretty nice, even if his hair smells like mold.  
But back to the problem at hand.  
“Website under construction”  
What does that mean, website under construction?  
She checks the date in the bottom corner of the website. It was last updated when she was about nine years old.  
This was her only hope, dammit. This was going to be what told her how the hell she was supposed to figure out what makes her so damn special.  
She pulls out her mother’s letter and smooths it out. It’s starting to fall apart, and she has it practically memorized after all the hours that she’s spent pouring over it, looking for another clue that might help her out, at least a little bit.  
You should never be too set in your ways, mija.  
You should never be to set in your ways.  
Maybe that’s the problem. Maybe she’s just been here too long, and it feels too much like home for her powers to show up properly, or something. She aches to get up and start packing, but she knows that it isn’t the right time yet. She doesn’t have enough money saved to really get anywhere, nor does she really have any idea where she might go. None of this is helpful.  
God damn it.  
Besides, she doesn’t want to wake up her roommate twice in one night.  
She tries to tell herself that all of these are valid reasons to stay, and they are, but she’s ignoring the glaring one that matters more than all of the others.  
She doesn’t want to go. This feels like home, now. The bookstore is comfortable, the beds are soft, the cat has just started trusting her enough to let her feed and pet him.  
Everyone here is nice. Everything here is okay, even if it isn’t as okay as if she was really home. She didn’t have a place to go when she was kicked out. The idea, now, of leaving the only place that she does have, is the scariest thing that she can think of. It doesn’t feel right to leave.  
Before, it didn’t feel right either. She didn’t have a place to go, either. But then, she was angry. She had a drive to get as far away as possible, and she could kill the sadness, just for a bit, with the anger at how unfair it was that she was arbitrarily kicked out of her house with nothing but some pieces of paper and a suitcase full of clothes.  
Now, there are people who want her to stay. There is nobody to tell her to leave. There is nothing to give her suggestions as for where to go, even in the form of currency. There isn’t anybody here who is going to tell her that she needs to be somewhere else unless it’s to tell her that she needs to go to her next shift or check out this museum or restaurant.  
But what if she stays, and her powers never show up? That’s the whole reason that she had to leave home. That’s the whole reason she is where she is in the first place. So what if in staying, all that she’s doing is sabotaging herself?  
She might come home with nothing. She could stay here for the rest of the year, save enough money for a plane ticket home, and have to look her family in the eyes and say that nothing changed. Maybe they wouldn’t even let her stay if her powers never showed up.  
It’s the end of November, now, and she doesn’t have any idea what she’s going to do. Maybe a deadline will help, she thinks, and tries to think of a reasonable date to leave by.  
Thea told her that the holiday season is always the busiest, and that people might be more willing to tip, or to buy massive amounts of books at once. She also said that tensions run high during the holidays, and there’s always an influx of new people at the store who are trying to run away from something.  
So maybe she can leave after the holiday season. That way, there will be room for those who are running, and she’ll have a bit of extra cash to get to where she’s going. New Year’s Eve will be her last day here. That’s enough time for her to figure out how to say goodbye.

Chapter 9: Édith  
Édith snuck out of her dad’s house at around 2 in the morning, just after her brother fell asleep on the couch. It hurt to leave almost as much as it did the first time. Before she left, she went into her old room and pressed her palm against the wall. She took some of the things that she couldn’t the first time: her mother’s jewelry that she had hidden so her father wouldn’t sell it off; the posters from her walls; some more of her books because the first time they were too heavy. She packs it all in a suitcase from the hall closet, the same place that they were kept when she left.  
She goes into the attic to look at the doorframe where she and her brother had carved their heights in every year with a pocketknife, or a kitchen knife when their father found out and took the pocket one away. The nostalgia doesn’t hurt as much as it did a few hours ago, but she still felt a lump in her throat that was nearly impossible to swallow around.  
The next day, she skipped work and went back to the bookshop. She followed her mother around, ducking behind shelves and burying her nose in a random book every time she turned around.  
She overslept this morning, and got in to work late to find out that she had been fired for missing a day without calling in. Turns out Lise had seen her walking past yesterday without calling in, assumed correctly that she was skipping a day rather than home sick, and told the boss automatically because she can’t keep her cursed mouth shut about anything.  
So now Édith is stuck, trying not to cry, still tired from the sleep that she’s missed, and without a job that she needs to pay the bills that she knows are in her apartment. She could go home, like she was supposed to months ago. She could call her brother and ask for a loan of some of the money that he’s saved slash stolen from their father.  
Or she could ignore the problem, go buy a pastry, and enjoy the second day off work in a row as best she can. She chooses the latter option.  
As she sits in the coffee shop, she weighs her options further. Maybe she could just find another job, but knowing how hard it was to get the first one when she was still in school, she isn’t hopeful.  
Maybe she could sell her potions. People would probably be suspicious of what was in them, though, and they could probably be considered a drug.  
In all honesty, going back home was probably the smartest thing to do. There, she has a guaranteed spot to live, she won’t have to work or pay rent, she knows that she’ll be safe.  
It does mean, however, that she would have to go back into the closet entirely, and apologize to her father, neither of which she plans to do, well, ever. She digs her phone out of her bag and connects to the café’s internet, sighs, and does the one thing that she promised herself she’d never do.  
Homeless shelters Paris  
This brings up thousands of results, and a little bit of revulsion. She doesn’t want to live in one of those places, full of dirty people who talk to the air and beg for money and do drugs and are sick and maybe she’s being the tiniest bit hypocritical. After all, at this point she is one of those people, or getting close.  
And then she remembers the bookstore, and how there were beds inside. Maybe her mother has some space for her. Does she live there? Do other people live there?  
After being abandoned for so long, maybe she can guilt her mother into giving her a place to stay, even just until she can get another job and an apartment. Édith barely remembers what it feels like to have a parent around. Even her constantly absent father was still there, to go to meetings at the school or pay the housekeeper or absently state that he cares about his sons. After living alone for so long, Édith doesn’t know how she’d take to sharing a space with somebody , or how she’s going to manage to deal with somebody issuing commands like “go to school” or “go to bed” or “change your clothes” or any of the number of parental things that she vaguely remembers.  
But despite this, her mother is looking like the best option as long as she can’t find another job or go to some sort of a shelter. Maybe something will turn up if she gives it some time. She decides to set herself a deadline. She doesn’t have nearly enough to pay the overdue bills on her apartment, won’t unless she gets paid for this week of work. So she figures she has about three days before she either pays or they kick her out. She has three days to find something, and if she doesn’t, she’ll go willingly to her mother’s place, rather than convince them to give her some time, like she’s done all of the other times.  
The landlord will probably be happy to see her gone. He doesn’t like the idea of having a child, as he sees her, living alone in his building. She doesn’t know if this is illegal, but she assumes so, as she knows for a fact that it’s legally questionable that she has (had, at least) a full time job and isn’t in school at all.  
When she gets up and leaves the shop, she does go to the front to ask if they’re hiring, but that’s really only to keep up appearances to herself. She knows where she’s going to end up, and as soon as she gets home, she starts packing.  
Never once does it cross her mind that her mom might not want her back.

Chapter 10: Édith  
Despite her best (not really her best, just what she wants to think of as her best) efforts to find another job, they kicked her out of the apartment three days later, exactly on the dot of when she expected them to. She called a taxi twenty minutes before they came, and when her landlord said that he “won’t be convinced to let you stay this time.” She didn’t argue, just asked him politely for her deposit back and some help in loading up the taxi.  
The deposit was more than she remembered it being, but then she’d lived there for a long time and when she moved in money wasn’t really a big worry. The taxi gets caught in the afternoon rush hour, and it takes over an hour to get to the shop. She unloads her boxes and suitcases onto the curb, pays the driver and tips him a little extra, looks up at the shop and sighs. It’s not raining, for once, so she leaves most of her boxes on the curb, praying that they won’t be stolen, picks up her bag that contains the most valuables, and walks inside.  
She finds her mother upstairs, talking to some stoner kid who Édith has never seen before on her trips to the shop. She lets them finish their conversation before going up and tapping her mother on the shoulder.  
“Maman?” She winces at how small her own voice sounds, like she’s eight years old all over again.  
The woman turns around, shocked.  
“Léo?” Her eyes widen, and then she pulls Édith into a tight embrace. “I’ve missed you.”  
Édith is suddenly angry. How dare she say that she missed me, when she never tried to come back home?  
“Then why didn’t you come back?”  
Her mother’s eyes widen again, but this time she starts to cry. This was not the intended effect, and it certainly wasn’t what a younger, less angry Édith had pictured meeting her mother again to be like. But this Édith is older and sadder and really has nothing to lose, so she pushes the point a bit further.  
“Why didn’t you come back home?”  
Her mother grabs a tissue from the table next to her, sits down heavily, and blows her nose. “It’s not my place to tell you.”  
“That’s not a real answer.”  
“It’s the only one that I can give you right now. And it’s an honest one.”  
Édith glares.  
“I’m sorry.” She really does look sorry. Édith softens a bit. “Why do you have a suitcase?”  
“The rest of my stuff is outside still.” She says. “I’m staying with you for a while.”  
She wasn’t sure how her mother would react, but she certainly didn’t expect the wide grin that she receives.  
“Let me call for some help,” she says, “so we can get you all set up.”  
Help turns out to be another taxicab to take them to her apartment, a few blocks away. It’s small, with just a kitchen, a bedroom, and a living room with a small couch that Édith is told will make quite a suitable bed if she’s okay with it. Édith can’t help but notice, and observes aloud, that the apartment looks more like a hotel then it does like a home.  
“I usually stay at the store,” she replies. “There is more life there.”  
She explains how they’ve been letting people stay there in exchange for working for years.  
“It’s a family tradition”, she says. “One that I’m quite sure your father would never have mentioned. He doesn’t quite believe in charity.” Édith is surprised to hear the bitterness in her voice, the anger, even after years, that she still harbors for her ex-husband. Thea shakes her head, as if to clear the darkness away from her thoughts.  
“What would you like to call me?” She asks, later, over tea. She’s taken the afternoon off to catch up a bit with her child. “And what would you like me to call you? I remember you as Léo, but that doesn’t seem quite right anymore.”  
Édith didn’t expect for her mother to pick up on it, although she doesn’t know how. She is in full makeup. She is out. She thinks, why not, and answers, “Édith.”  
Her mother nods. “And what are your pronouns, Édith?”  
Édith wasn’t expecting this. Nobody ever asks, they just assume. It’s kind of nice, being asked. It’s kind of nice, knowing that asking is a thing that people do. She’s a little bit at a loss for words. “She, I think.”  
Her mother nods, slowly. “Let me know if I make a mistake.”  
Édith wants to cry. This is so much. She wants to think of her mother as the villain, the one who abandoned her and never told her why. She doesn’t want to like the nice tea and soft words and concern that feels more genuine than any conversation she’s had in the past year. She doesn’t want this to feel good.  
“You never answered my question.” Édith jumps, snapping out of her thoughts, and realizes that she may have been staring at the walls.  
“Sorry, which one?”  
“What are you going to call me?”  
“I don’t know quite what you mean.”  
“Well, I haven’t seen you in so long that you might not want to call me Maman, and you can’t just call me ‘excuse me’. So maybe, I was thinking you could call me by my name.”  
Édith blushes and looks at her hands. “I don’t know your name.”  
Her mother looks down, too, but she seems more sad than embarrassed. “Thea.” She says. “I guess we both learned each other’s names today.”

Interlude  
Time passes, as time tends to do. Édith moves in with Thea, something Thea had always hoped for but never really expected. It doesn’t work out in the way that either of them hoped for. After their initial promise of a repaired relationship that they experience in the first few days, they discover that neither one is really used to living with another person in their space. Édith doesn’t really know how to listen to a parent anymore, although, to be fair, Thea doesn’t really know how to parent.  
So it isn’t perfect, and it isn’t really improving over the next few weeks.  
Thea still won’t tell Édith why she left, and Édith is becoming continually more frustrated with this. Thea refuses to tell her anything about it, because she can’t figure out a way to justify running away to her daughter when she still can’t justify it to herself. She was trapped in a bad marriage, except that it wasn’t the worst marriage, it wasn’t exceptional, maybe, her husband was a bit absent by anyone’s standards, but she liked him well enough. And they had kids. She should have been thinking of the kids. She didn’t really though, when she got up one night, decided that she was bored, and left on a whim, without even packing.  
She went home to her parents house, the parents that she had run away from on a whim, too, years ago, moved back in with them and started working at their bookstore. Her father died, a few years later, and her mother went five days after. They never got bored, she thinks, a little bitterly, when she remembers how much they cared about everything that they did. How come I didn’t get that gene?  
Science never really was her strong suit in school.  
So neither of them are sure of what to do with the time that they have together.  
Noa is still in the same boat that she was when we saw her last. She is lost, not sure whether to stay or go, but holding firm on her deadline.  
As always, the store is at its busiest point in the year. All three of them throw themselves into their work with abandon. Thea sets Noa and Édith several of the same shifts, thinking to force them into a friendship because they’re the same age and gender.  
They both make fun of this tactic, but they end up friends as a result of mutual distain, so in an ironic way that they would never admit to Thea or each other, her method of throwing them together works. It’s also easier to make it through endless shifts of rude holiday customers who are angry that you can’t accommodate their special request in an understaffed, family-run store during the holidays, because it’s Christmas and they simply need just this one favor to really get into the spirit.  
Thea starts bothering Édith about going back to school.  
Édith invites her brother to the store for Christmas, and introduces him to Noa. He shakes hands with their mother, joins Édith in ignoring her, and sits down with the two girls, a stolen bottle of rum, some enthusiastically told childhood stories, and a Santa hat that falls off every time he laughs. Everyone is charmed, except for his mother, who is worried that her teenage son is drinking, but even more worried that her opinion as his mother doesn’t carry enough weight to be able to force him to stop.  
The holidays end. Noa starts packing. Édith catches her at it.  
We will rejoin them, still managing a day-old hangover, in the post-christmas haze that lingers a bit too long every year. 

Part 3: Runaways

Chapter 1: Noa  
“Noa?”  
She flinches, and turns around slowly. See, that’s the problem with living in such a public place. Even when the store is closed and there are no customers around, she was stupid to think that there would be any privacy whatsoever. Édith is standing in the door, looking worried.  
“Are you coming to lunch?”  
“Yeah, dude, give me a minute.” Édith flinches this time. God damn it. Noa can never manage to remember not to call her by masculine things. She feels like an asshole every time she does, and it always slips out. “Sorry, I forgot again.”  
“Don’t worry about it.” Édith smiles weakly, and massages her head with her fingers.  
“Do you still have a headache?” Noa asks.  
“Yeah,” Édith sighs. “It’s kind of killing me.”  
As they walk downstairs, Édith bursts out like she was waiting to say it. “Can I ask you something?”  
Noa doesn’t really want to answer the question that she knows is coming, but she really doesn’t want to be rude. “Of course.”  
“Are you leaving?”  
“In a few days, I guess.” She braces herself for the inevitable question of why, one that she doesn’t really trust herself to have a plausible answer to.  
“Can I come with?”  
This wasn’t what she expected at all.  
“Um.” She doesn’t know what to say.  
“No, I get it, if you have somewhere to go, or if you don’t really want me along.”  
“No! It’s not that, of course it’s not. I just don’t have any real plan and you just found your mom and I don’t want to mess things up between the two of you and…”  
Édith cuts in. “Finding my mom was a bad idea. It’s really her that I want to get away from.”  
Noa is getting a little angry, now. “Look, you shouldn’t throw away your time with her.”  
“She abandoned me in the first place.”  
“So now you have the opportunity to fix things. Why don’t you take it? All I’m saying is that if it were me…”  
“Well, it isn’t you and you don’t know a god damn thing about it, so…”  
They’ve stopped walking, are standing facing each other, tense, about to get into a real fight if they don’t manage to cut themselves off before this goes any further.  
“What makes you think that I don’t know anything about it?”  
The fight goes out of Noa, and Édith softens, a bit, mirroring her.  
“You never did tell me why you’re here.”  
Noa glares, again, suddenly angry. Why won’t Édith just fix her stupid relationship? Noa would kill for the chance to spend five minutes with her mother, hasn’t seen her in weeks and is missing her more by the day, and Édith gets to live with her mother, gets the chance to see her and talk to her and touch her every day, and she chooses not to take it. Noa can’t believe how selfish she’s being. She can’t believe how unfair it is, that Édith thinks that she has the right to know anything about Noa, when she won’t tell her anything either.  
They’ve reached an impasse, both glaring at each other.  
Noa turns away, breaking the eye contact again.  
Her voice breaks. “You have to at least try.”  
Édith wants to cry, too, but she isn’t sure that she can. The lump in her throat is back, matching the pounding in her head.  
“I don’t know how.”  
Thea walks in the room, and when she asks them if they’re ready for lunch, they say yes in unison and follow her, not looking at each other.  
Noa is still a bit worried about Édith wanting to come along. Throughout lunch, she looks like she’s a puzzling something out, the same way that she looks when she does a crossword or reads a book that’s popular but she isn’t enjoying. When they make eye contact, they both look away, a bit awkward, but all of the heat behind the argument has dissipated, or at least most of it.  
After a fairly silent lunch, with Thea abandoning most of her efforts at conversation, Noa starts going back upstairs when Édith taps her on the shoulder.  
“Mind if I tag along?”  
“Are you going to stop me from packing?”  
“No.”  
“Fine.”  
Noa continues to fold her clothes, placing them neatly in the rapidly filling suitcase.  
“I think I figured out why you left home.”  
“I didn’t leave. I got kicked out.”  
“Doesn’t change what I think.”  
Noa slams the top of her suitcase shut.  
“And what exactly do you think, Édith. Please, tell me your theories about why my life is how it is.”  
“Look, Noa, it’s not what you think. Look, if I’m wrong, you can tell me I’m crazy or take it as a joke or whatever. If I’m right, then I think you’ll be more inclined to let me come along with you.”  
“Fine. Go ahead.”  
“Do you want to sit down?”  
Noa sits, a bit huffy, and Édith wrings her hands for a minute before coming out with what she needs to say.  
“I think that your family has magic, too.”  
“What?”  
“The tradition?”  
Noa curls in on herself. “How did you know?”  
“My family is the same. And you’re sixteen, which fits, and you have no idea what you’re doing, which fits, and I saw a bit of that letter that you always carry around and read when you think that nobody’s looking.”  
“That’s personal.”  
Édith shrugs. “I don’t read English very well, anyway. And I only saw a bit, and it really just confirmed my theory.”  
“So you have magic in your family, too?”  
“Yes.”  
“What’s your thing? How does it work? How do I figure out mine? How long does it take?” All of Noa’s questions begin to spill out, unintended.  
Édith sighs. “I don’t really have many more answers than you do.”  
“So there’s no, like, guidebook to being a witch that they give you once you finish your year?”  
“I mean, maybe there is, but I never went back home once my year was up, so I really wouldn’t know, but I doubt it.”  
“I really don’t know anything about you. How come you never went back home? Your brother seems nice enough.”  
“My father said that he didn’t want me back in his house unless I was prepared to be his son.” Édith’s voice gets harsher as she speaks.  
“Oh. I’m sorry.”  
“Nothing that you could have done. He’s just a transphobic piece of shit.”  
“Still, I’m sorry.”  
“Why do people always say that?” she blurts out. “Why does every single fucking person think that saying sorry makes it better? It doesn’t get better. It’s never going to change the fact that I had to lose my family because my father finds me disgusting. It’s never going to change the fact that I’ll never be good enough for him. It doesn’t change the fact that I lost my fucking home, or that I dropped out of school, or that I had to spend all of my free time working just so I didn’t live on the streets and I lost that fucking job because I lose everything.”  
“Édith-“ Noa is at a loss as to how to possibly respond to this.  
“Nothing changes the fact that the only thing I have left to hold on to is this shitty power, but every time that I use it all it does is remind me that I’m my father’s son, which is the last thing that I want to be.” She’s crying in earnest, now. “I’m nobody’s fucking son.”  
“Fuck that.” Noa says.  
Édith looks up. “What?”  
“Fuck that. Fuck all of this. Let’s be fucking runaways. I wasn’t going to leave yet, but tonight is just as good as any other.”  
Édith stares at her, wordless, and scrubs her hand over her eyes. “You’re going to let me come?”  
“Yeah. Do you still want to come?”  
“Yeah. Where are we going to go?”  
“Anywhere. See that fucking globe? Spin it. Anywhere but here.”  
Édith does as she’s told, and spins.

Chapter 2: Édith  
Édith almost cried when Noa said that she didn’t want her coming along when she left.  
She cried again when she went on that stupid rant about how hard her life is.  
She would probably have started crying for a third time, or maybe just cried harder because the third came on the tail end of the second, when Noa said that she could come with.  
The initial spin of the globe didn’t quite work out how they wanted it to, because they landed on the south of France, and that felt a little bit too close for comfort. The second time, though, it landed on China.  
Édith knows nothing about China beyond her favorite types of takeaway and the way that the language sounds and the obnoxious tour groups. She knows about the Great Wall, and the size, and the fact that you can’t actually see the Great Wall from space no matter how many times your little brother tries to tell you that they can, and that he’s going to become an astronaut just to prove you wrong.  
Édith thinks about him, for just a minute, before remembering that this isn’t like the first time she had to go away from him. She doesn’t have to follow the rules that she had to follow then. She can call and text and he’ll be fine without her, and she’ll miss him, but she’ll still be able to talk to him more than she could when they lived in the same city. The guilt settles heavy in her stomach, another stone on the pile that is slowly filling her up. It hasn’t filled her yet, though, so she chooses to ignore it.  
They are sitting in Thea’s apartment, using her computer to research the cost of plane tickets and debating back and forth the ethics of using her credit card to purchase them and which day would make the most sense to leave.  
“She was absent in my life for ages. She owes me.”  
“Maybe she owes you, but I totally owe her. That evens out, so we have to use our own money only to purchase the tickets.”  
“What kind of insane barter system does that go by?”  
“The same one that you go by when you say that she owes you.”  
“She does owe me! Statistically, the cost of raising a child is, like, one hundred thousand dollars, yes?”  
“Okay.”  
“So we assume that each parent owes half of that.”  
“No. That’s insane.”  
“So, my father raised me, so he’s basically paid his due. My mother, on the other hand…”  
“We can’t steal from Thea.”  
“You might not want to, but I certainly don’t see a problem with it.”  
“Yes you do, you just don’t want to admit it to yourself. But you know it’ll just make you feel like shit later if you use her money now.”  
Édith glares. She’s not right. I can do this. I feel fine about it.  
But that’s a bit too much lying to herself, even for Édith’s taste. She sighs.  
“How much does a ticket cost?”  
“600 euro, give or take.”  
“That’s so much of what we have. Are you sure that we can’t just, like, take it?” Even as Édith says it, she knows that it isn’t what they’re going to do.  
“What if we just ask for a loan?”  
“Without telling her what we’re doing? She’s not that dumb.”  
“No, I mean,” Noa pauses, looking uncomfortable. “What if we tell her we’re leaving?”  
“I thought that was the last thing that you wanted to do.”  
“Only because I didn’t know how to explain why I needed to go. But if you have magic in your family, too, then she has it in her.”  
“No she doesn’t.”  
“What do you mean? You have it, so of course she does too. Can you have magic without your mother having it? Is that even possible?”  
“My father has it, Noa.”  
“Oh.” She looks immediately apologetic, and covers her mouth with her hands. “I’m so bad at this, I just keep forgetting.”  
“I know.”  
“So she doesn’t know that you have it in your family?”  
“Honestly, I don’t know whether or not my father told her, or how much he told her at all. He might have been waiting to tell us at the same time, or something.”  
“That’s awful. Why wouldn’t he tell her?”  
“He’s kind of just like that. I don’t really know.” Édith doesn’t understand why she feels the sudden need to defend her father to Noa. It’s not like he was a great father, or even a good one. It’s not like he still cares about her. He’s always kind of had that effect, though, one that makes people around him really want to like him unless he gives them a solid, ongoing reason not to.  
“What’s his power? Sorry, was that not an okay thing to ask?”  
“Don’t worry about it. He never told me, actually. I can only really guess.”  
“What do you think that it is?”  
“I mean it really could be anything. I guess maybe he’s good at manipulating people, although whether that’s just him being charismatic or him actually having some sort of extra power to do that is anyone’s guess.”  
“Fair enough.” Noa worries her bottom lip between her teeth. “I still think that we should talk to Thea.”  
“There’s no way that she’ll be okay with me leaving. Not when she just got me back.”  
“I think that you’re underestimating the amount that she cares about you.”  
“What’s that supposed to mean?”  
“Well, I think that she really does want the best for you. She’s not stupid. She can see that the two of you sharing a space is a bad idea just as well as the rest of us can.”  
Édith narrows her eyes at this, but Noa plows on, looking down so she doesn’t have to make eye contact with Édith’s glare.  
“So I just think that if she thinks that you leaving is the best thing for you to do, then she’d be willing to help us out. At least, she wouldn’t force you to stay.”  
“We don’t have any way to be sure of that.”  
“We don’t have any way to be sure that we won’t die, or start fighting on the plane ride, or die in a train crash on the way to the airport.”  
“I still don’t want to talk to her about it.” Édith doesn’t want to admit to Noa that she might be right, but she stops glaring.  
“Fine, then.” Noa sighs. “If you won’t go talk to her, I will.”  
“You can’t do that.”  
“I’m not going to mention you, relax. It’s not my place to butt in where you don’t want me to be or do things that you really aren’t comfortable with. I’m still going to tell her I’m leaving, though, to ask her for some advice and maybe a destination other than China.”  
“I thought that you were fine with China.”  
“We don’t know anything about it more than that we like rice noodles.”  
Édith has to admit that she’s right, as much as she doesn’t want to. It might be a cool place for a vacation, but it’s definitely not the safest place for them to run away to if they know literally zero about it. She almost wishes that it was, though. It would be so nice to be able to point to anywhere on the globe and be able to travel there, knowing that you would be safe, and able to afford it, and happy.  
“I think that we should wait a bit longer before leaving, too.”  
“I thought that you were in a hurry.”  
“I was, but now I feel like we need to plan this more.”  
“Why do I change it?”  
“Because it changes where we can go, I guess.”  
“That doesn’t make any sense. Where were you planning to go before I invited myself along?”  
“Honestly, I was going to go back to America.”  
“Oh. I’ve never been to America.”  
“Well, I’ve never been away from it, except for, well, now.”  
“Did you like it there?”  
“It was alright. But not every place there is the same, you know.”  
“Of course I know that.” Édith blushes. She might know a bit more about America, but that’s really only from movies that she’s seen set there, or what she can overhear and understand from the tourists that she sees all the time when she works in the shop. “Where in America where you planning to go?”  
“Honestly, I think that I just wanted to go home.”  
“You can’t go home yet.”  
“I know that. It doesn’t mean that I don’t want to, though.” Édith feels for her, remembers all of the days in her year that she wished that she could go back home and be taken care of. Noa’s home, and her family, from what she’s told her right before she sneaks off to cry, are the most wonderful people in the world. Édith sees her missing them, and wonders quite how that feels. She missed her brother, but really what she missed was not having to work and being able to leave things on her floor and have somebody else pick them up, and not having to remember to pay the bills to keep the lights on, and dragging bags to the Laundromat just so that she could have clean clothes.  
All of the things that she missed came from the long to-do list of new things that she has to do in order to have a properly functioning life. Noa misses the things that she doesn’t have anymore. She misses her family around her, and her group of friends, and the way that her bedroom looks.  
Noa misses this more because she knows that she has a chance to go back to it. Édith knew from the start that she didn’t really get to have that, so she was more equipped to not allow herself to miss what she could never get back.  
She sees Noa counting down the days and subconsciously tending towards things that remind her of home, and it almost makes her miss her own home, even if it stopped being one a few months after she left it.  
“What if we go somewhere else,” Édith asks, trying to stop Noa from getting sad over what she doesn’t have, and trying harder to stop herself from getting sad over what Noa is going to have back in a few months. “What if we just pick another place in America? What’s a city that you’ve always wanted to visit?”  
“San Francisco?”  
“Is that like New York? That’s the only city that I know, sorry.”  
“No, it’s on the other side of the country, and it’s all hilly, and it has this bridge, it’s called the Golden Gate Bridge, and…” She trails off. “I don’t really know that much about it, either, it just looks really beautiful.”  
“Well, why did you come here?”  
Noa looks down, a bit guilty. “Same reason.”  
“So that turned out okay, you know. We met, I guess.”  
Noa smiles. “Sure. Fine. Do you every get tired of being right?”  
“No, not really. Does anyone, though?”  
“I guess not. San Francisco?”  
“San Francisco.”  
“Maybe San Francisco will be our always.”  
“That joke is overdone.”  
“That book was awful.”  
“True.”  
It isn’t a perfect solution, but they feel kind of okay, now. Anything is better than fighting. Nobody really fights by choice, they fight because they’re bored or angry about something else or scared or any number of things. It’s rare to have a fight that is actually over the thing that it’s over.  
Édith is scared. She is scared of leaving again. She is scared of making people angry at her. She is scared of missing people. She is even more scared of having people miss her.  
She doesn’t know how this is going to work out. Honestly, she doesn’t think that leaving is a smart idea. She knows on an intellectual level that she’s known Noa for a month, maybe, and they want to run away to a city that they’ve never been to before, that they know nothing about, just to not have to be in the city that they’re in.  
She knows all of this. She keeps running over it, that night, curled up in bed and trying to sleep and regretting the one last cup of strong tea that she had a few hours ago and is paying the price for. She knows it, but it doesn’t feel important. It doesn’t feel like a big decision, just like one that’s been made.  
When you’re a kid, choices are made for you. You can question them, but it’s so much easier to go along with it and be passive, especially if you’re scared of the person making the choice for you.  
Édith doesn’t like to go back on decisions, even when she can rationalize the reasons not to follow through. She is the adult, now, who has made the decisions that she doesn’t want to listen to. But it’s still easier to go along with it, to argue and whine and kick and scream, a bit, but to force yourself through it, because life goes on, she rationalizes.  
The world keeps turning and the sun keeps coming up and just about everyone but you remains unaffected. And if the world ends, then presumably you don’t have to worry about the effects of the choices that you made, because you don’t have to worry about anything anymore.  
So when her inner adult says absolutely do not talk to your mother no matter what else you let Noa decide, she holds firm on that. Noa isn’t thrilled, but she agrees.

Chapter 3: Noa  
Noa has never really been a big fan of lying to anyone. When she was six, and broke one of her abuela’s numerous porcelain figurines, she went crying first to her mother, who told her not to worry and that they could replace it without abuela knowing, and then to her abuela, when she felt so guilty about the lie two days in that she would rather be punished than live with herself. Abuela wasn’t that angry, and Noa had known that she wouldn’t be, but she couldn’t handle keeping the secret. Her mother was always proud of that, proud that she had taught her daughter good manners and honesty. She would always brag it up, at parent-teacher conferences or to the tías or at PTA meetings when she had the time to go.  
She would say, “Ay, you have to teach these kids some manners nowadays.” Her chest would swell with pride. “My Noa, she knows not to lie to me. She knows to respect her mother.”  
Noa doesn’t like to lie.  
When she lies to Édith, her palms get sweaty and begin to itch, in the same way that they did when she broke that vase. She tried her best to play it off, like she was frustrated that Édith refused to talk to Thea, which she was, but mostly she didn’t want Édith to know that she was going to talk to Thea anyway.  
Noa tries to understand why Édith doesn’t want to talk to her mother. Rebuilding trust is difficult, she guesses, but she doesn’t know why Édith has to be so obstinate about it. She won’t even let Noa go on her own to talk to her, without even mentioning her name as being involved.  
Noa goes anyway, knowing that Thea can’t really stop her from leaving, even though she won’t really be able to explain why she needs to go. She goes a couple days after the day that they begin to plan out what they’re going to do, and choose a destination.  
She finds Thea at the piano during one of Édith’s shifts.  
“Thea? Sorry to bother you, but might I be able to pick your brain a bit?”  
“Of course, Noa.” Thea gets up from the piano. “I was going to go out and get tea, anyway. Would it work for you to join me?”  
Noa nods.  
They walk together to the tea shop, not talking much, as Noa is trying to plan out what she’s going to ask and how she can ask it without offending Thea or mentioning Édith in any way.  
They receive their drinks and sit down at a table in the window.  
Noa takes a deep breath. “I’m thinking about leaving.”  
“You are?” Thea looks surprised, and maybe a bit disappointed, Noa thinks, although that could just be me seeing what I want to. Maybe she doesn’t care all that much. People come and go here all the time. How special can I really be? “Do you want to tell me why?”  
“Not really.”  
“That’s your choice, and I respect it, although I do wish that you’d tell me why you feel the need to leave. Just know that you will always have a place here.”  
Noa looks down at her hands, and begins studying cup for her drink intensely. She doesn’t know what to say to this, but she can feel herself getting choked up, which is the last thing that she wants to do in public. “Thank you.”  
“Where are you going to go? Do you have a place to stay?  
“Um.” Noa says, clearing her throat. “I was hoping to maybe get a bit of your advice on those?”  
“You know you want to leave, but you don’t know to where or what you’re going to do when you get there.”  
“Well, almost. I mean, I know that I want to go to San Francisco.”  
“Why there?”  
“Why not? I came to Paris because it was where I wanted to be in the moment, so I guess my reasoning is the same.”  
“Do you know anything about the city?”  
Noa blushes. It sounds like such a bad idea when pressed. “It worked here? And I used to live in America, so I guess I know things better there.”  
Thea furrows her brow. “I don’t think that it’s a good idea for you to be alone in a new city, regardless of how things turned out here. Are you truly set on leaving?”  
“Yeah, I guess. And I don’t want you to think that I’m ungrateful or anything, I just…” she trails off a bit. Thea waits for her to finish, so she says, “…need to go.”  
Thea doesn’t look thrilled, but she nods. “I wont pretend that I understand, but regardless I want to help you out. I maybe have some contacts in California. I can reach out to them, ask them if they can put you up or help you find a job.”  
“Oh.” Noa didn’t expect this kind of help. “You really don’t have to…”  
Thea nods like the conversation is finished, and in a way Noa guesses it is. “I’d like to increase your shifts until you have to leave, so you can have enough money to buy a plane ticket. You should know that I opened a bank account for you, too, to put your paychecks into, so we can get you set up with a card before you go.”  
“I was thinking of leaving, like, as soon as possible, though.” Noa bites her lip. The last thing that she wants to sound is ungrateful for the help, because it really is huge, but the longer they wait and the more that Thea is involved, the more Édith will worry. She’s going to be angry enough at Noa, anyway.  
“Can you and Édith wait a week before going?”  
“What?” Noa pushes her chair back a bit. “I didn’t say anything about Édith. How did you know that she’s coming?”  
“I didn’t really, but you just confirmed it. I’m not blind, I see how close you are with my daughter, and the fact that you two have been plotting something lately. As soon as you came to me for advice, I knew that I was going to find out what it was.”  
“Are you angry?”  
“Disappointed, maybe. I really would have loved to have our relationship work out better.”  
Noa squirms in her seat, uncomfortable with the way that the conversation is going.  
“Are you going to make her stay?”  
“I don’t think that I have the right nor the capability to force her to do anything. I would like her to stay, but if she has to leave then I’m going to make sure that the two of you get safely to where you need to be. If San Francisco is where that is, then I can make that happen.”  
“She’s going to be mad at me.”  
“Why?”  
“I wasn’t supposed to tell you anything about her being involved. I wasn’t supposed to talk to you about it at all.”  
“Let me talk to her. I won’t say that you told me, but I think that I can convince her to let me help you two out a bit. I’d like to hope that you’ll stay in touch, when you go, and come back to visit sometime.”  
Thea stands up, clearly ready to leave. Noa, a bit surprised, stands up to give her a hug.  
“Of course I’ll visit.”  
“Give me a week to try and set things up, alright?”  
“Okay.”  
“I’ll see you back at the store.”  
“Yes, ma’am.”  
Thea leaves, and Noa sits back down. Maybe, she thinks, this isn’t the way to figure out what I’m doing. What if I just fall back into routine again?  
She wishes that she had more information. She wishes that she knew more about what she was supposed to be doing in order to become the witch that she was always meant to be, or something. She half-wishes that she could forget about all of this and just go home and wake up and have had a strange dream.  
The thing is, though, a month ago she would have called it a nightmare.  
Progress is progress, even if she’s not sure, really, if it’s forward or sideways or even upside down. At the very least, she doesn’t feel like she’s only going backwards, and that, she can almost live with.

Chapter 4: Édith  
Édith has never left France before on anything more than a field trip, and on those they took buses and trains. The furthest they went was the Netherlands, for an MUN conference where it rained the whole time and half of the kids got food poisoning, so they went home early.  
Going on an airplane for the first time was ten shades of bizarre. The safety demonstration felt longer than the rest of the flight, and Édith couldn’t stop from gripping the arm rests as they told her all of the things that she should do in the event of horrifying disasters. Noa tuned it out, choosing instead to focus on her book, a cheap paperback that she grabbed from the front of the shop on the way out.  
When the plane took off, Édith prayed like she hadn’t since second grade when she thought that Jesus was watching her.  
When they touched down, it felt like she could breathe for the first time in fifteen hours. They walked out into a big airport, through a glass tube, where they shuffled through security. Édith passed over the passport that her mother had paid for, smiled, and nodded when the man asked if this was her first time in America. She met Noa on the other side, yawning and rubbing her eyes.  
“Welcome to America. What do you think?”  
“I think I need a coffee.”  
“That sounds like the best idea I’ve heard all day.”  
They walk over to the nearest Starbucks, and Noa turns her phone on.  
“Did you know that this is the first time that I’ve had cell service in months.”  
“You didn’t set your phone up to Paris service?”  
“No.”  
“Why not?”  
“I didn’t know how to bring it up at first and then I guess that I just forgot about it completely and never managed to get around to it.”  
“Fair enough.”  
Noa’s phone buzzes softly. It’s around three in the morning, and it’s finally catching up to all of the texts that she’s missed. She scrolls through them. Édith walks around the table to look over her shoulder.  
“Where are you?”  
“Dude, there was a fight in the cafeteria today. Julian and Felix were…”  
“Do you know what the English homework is?”  
“Why aren’t you responding?”  
“Look a t this fUCKIGN M EME I S2G”  
“I miss you.”  
Noa dismisses the notifications and puts the phone facedown on the table. She looks like she’s trying not to cry. Édith has never had the best bedside manner, but she tries her best.  
“What were your friends like?”  
“They’re still my friends.” Noa says sharply. She shakes her head. “I didn’t mean that. It’s just, like, I didn’t really miss them, but all of a sudden I do, and it sucks.”  
“No, I get that.” Édith thinks desperately for a way to explain properly without turning the conversation to herself. “Like, leaving is so sudden, right, and then because they’re gone so completely so suddenly you don’t even think to miss them, but then something will bring them back into focus for a minute, and every time that you didn’t think about them gets made up for.”  
“Yeah. Basically. How do you handle it?”  
“Not well.”  
Noa laughs a little. Her phone buzzes again, and she frowns at it.  
“You don’t have to check it if you don’t want to.”  
Noa shakes her head. “It’s alright.” She picks up the phone. “Thea’s friend is coming to pick us up. She says she’ll be here in like 20 minutes.”  
“Oh. Do we know anything about this person?”  
“Thea does, apparently.”  
“And what does Thea know?”  
“Just that she has two job openings and an air mattress and a couch.”  
“Good enough for me. What jobs will we be doing?”  
“We’re going to be working at yet another bookstore.”  
“Oh. At least we’ll be experienced.”  
Noa grins. “Yeah. At least that.”  
They drag their bags out to the pickup zone, and meet Thea’s friend, a smiley blonde woman named Marissa.  
Noa shakes her hand, doing her best to remember every single manner that her Abuela drilled into her. She straightens her back and smiles the best that she can with the anxiety over this meeting and the exhaustion of travel pushing heavy on her shoulders and chest. “Nice to meet you. I’m Noa, this is Édith.” She gives the woman, Marissa, a firm handshake. Édith just nods, doing her best not to nod off entirely despite the coffee that she downed. “Sorry, we’re a bit tired.”  
“No worries, girls. Hop in and you can go right to sleep.”  
Édith wonders how this lady is so awake at such an ungodly hour of the morning, and takes a moment to be impressed with home well Noa fakes awakeness and manners, even if she does glare a bit at Édith when she doesn’t shake Marissa’s hand. Oh well. She can always use the excuse that her English gets worse when she’s tired.  
Later, when Noa teaches her the term “soccer mom” (and also the terms soccer, and mom), she privately calls Marissa that in her head almost exclusively, and even out loud once or twice. But that night, nothing has ever felt better than that couch and blanket and the ability to sleep in.  
When they get up, there’s a very nice, if passive-aggressive, note on the refrigerator. It reads as follows:  
Good morning girls! (At least, Édith thinks, she called the two of them girls.)  
I usually don’t tolerate sleeping in, but I think that I can excuse it just this once. Please feel free to help yourselves to some fruit for breakfast or lunch, depending on when you get up. It would also be a big help if you could clean up my living room a bit! When you’re ready, come down to the store. (Please see the map on the back of this note). We need to discuss when you will start working, what your duties will be, workplace etiquette, and where you’re going to live.  
See you soon!  
Marissa.  
Noa translates this for Édith, rattling it off in the kind of rapid French that she’s only developed in the past few weeks. She then reminds Édith softly that improving her English would probably be the smart thing to do, a fact that Édith has been mentally avoiding extremely staunchly. English is hard. It took her months to be able to understand tourist’s coffee orders.  
They follow the note, and clean up the living room as instructed. They then follow the neat map the two blocks uphill that it takes to reach the bookstore. It sits on a corner; a slightly round building in a soft grey with books in the window. There are two doors, both of which are flying American flags. Édith glances at Noa.  
“Is that a thing that Americans do?”  
“What?”  
“Put your flag up everywhere. They don’t do that at home.”  
“It’s a thing that weird Americans do.”  
They cross the street, past a bakery that smells absolutely heavenly, and go into the store. A little bell tinkles, and a kid with very choppy hair dyed a strange color looks up. They have so many pieces of metal in their face and ears and so many different streaky colors in their hair that it takes Édith a minute or so of staring to sort of understand what the kid’s real face looks like.  
“I’m Will. Marissa’s kid. Mom said that you should be here soon.”  
Édith has to rely on Noa to relay this message, which she does without blinking.  
Will smiles. “Let’s get you all started. What are your names?”  
This Édith can respond to.  
“Édith.”  
“Noa.”  
Will fixes their gaze on Édith, bemused. “Ah, so you can speak. Mom said that she hasn’t heard you say one word this whole time.”  
Édith wants to sigh, but she forces herself to smile instead, and asks Noa through gritted teeth if he’s making fun of her.  
Noa smiles, first at Édith, trying to placate her, and next at Will. It’s a little bit infuriating.  
“Will, Édith doesn’t actually speak English.”  
“Oh. Shit, I feel so bad now. No wonder she hasn’t said anything. I don’t speak French, so are you okay to be translator while I give you guys the grand tour and the rules for working here?”  
They both nod.  
“Great!” Will says brightly. He takes them around the store, chattering about the rules the entire time. There are a lot.  
“Mom runs this place like it’s the fucking military. That’s why she was so desperate to bring you here, because everybody else quit. I only work here because she’s making me pay for college myself, mostly. You’ll get used to it, though. And you get to find an apartment. Are you excited? I’m pretty excited.”  
Édith keeps a mental list of the things that she’s noticed: given the chance, Will will chatter on until you cut him off; her English is pretty much nonexistent; the bookstore works the exact same way as Thea’s, except that every single thing that most people would assume to be true has to be a written-out rule; Will does not have any discernable gender based on face, voice, body language, or personal style; this seems like a job that she and Noa can manage pretty well.  
She’s optimistic, and tells Noa this. Noa doesn’t seem as sure.  
“You still need to be able to speak English, though, and we have to get you a work permit before you can really start working, which I have no idea how to do, and Marissa could fire us over something small. I don’t know. Maybe this was a bad idea.”  
“Even if it is,” Édith reasoned aloud, “we can hardly go back at this point. It would cost way too much. We might as well stick it out and get to work.”  
“Fair enough.” Noa is smiling a bit more than she was a second ago, though. When Will asks if they’re ready to start working, they both tell him yes, and receive their ugly staff shirts with the cartoon books on them with grateful nods. Will grins.  
It’s not awful.

Chapter 5: Noa  
It’s not awful. Okay, the work uniforms are kind of awful, especially since Marissa decided that adding baseball caps would be a nice touch. And the apartment that they find after a week or so, the one that costs all of the money they saved just to make the down payment, it’s pretty bad, too. They walk the half-mile to work every morning, and sleep on blankets on the floor, and reheat the same Chinese noodles 4 times before they run out.  
But it’s been two weeks, two weeks of working every day and sleeping on couches and finding an apartment and downgrading from the couches and it feels like an accomplishment every time they get a paycheck. Noa has been tutoring Édith in English, and she picks it up slowly. It helps that she is constantly surrounded by books, in English, at various levels of reading comprehension. Even if she’s irritated by the plot of the children’s books, she keeps smiling without meaning to whenever she makes it through one.  
So it’s not awful.  
Noa opened her social media accounts back up, to far too many messages asking where she is and what she’s doing. She still doesn’t want to bend the rules, though, so she doesn’t respond to any of them, as much as she itches to simply let her best friends know that she’s alive and well. It’s hard.  
Will continues to be as nice as they were on the first day, helping to teach Édith English and making the highest volume of puns that Noa’s ever seen coming from a single person and teaching her how to do cool makeup tricks.  
They’ve gotten over their jetlag, and moved on to messing up their sleep schedule by staying up too late watching movies, or reading. Noa’s never not had somebody around to tell her to go to sleep eventually. Even at the bookstore, she went to bed at a reasonable hour because she had roommates who she felt awful about disturbing.  
Édith, having lived alone before, has no such qualms.  
They show up to work on time every day, and one day, in the third week of January, Will nudges Noa.  
“Wanna come to a thing on Friday?”  
“What do you mean, a thing?”  
“Well, I figured you guys are still pretty new to the city and don’t really know anybody except for me and my mom and each other, so I thought it could be cool to go to a party.”  
Noa starts worrying. What kind of a party? Will they be drinking? Will they want me to drink? What if nobody likes me?  
Will interrupts her train of thought. “Stop worrying.”  
“I’m not!” She protests weakly.  
Will raises their eyebrows.  
“Fine, maybe a bit.”  
“I knew it.” Noa rolls her eyes. “It’s not subtle, dude. I can practically see the wheels in your head turning.”  
Noa sighs. “I’ll ask Édith.”  
On Friday, they leave the store and change in the apartment, and then walk with Will to a record store. It’s one that Noa’s never noticed before, although she’s been to this street a bunch of times. They go in, and go down the stairs.  
The room is not particularly well-lit, and is full of kids talking excitedly and holding cans of beer and waving to Noa and Édith.  
One boy runs out of the crowd. He’s tall, blonde, and looks like every California asshole stereotype. He pets Noa on the back of the head, and she flinches away.  
“Nice to meet you. Can I get you girls a drink?”  
It’s kind of gross and super questionable, and Édith clearly has no idea what’s going on, but is gearing up to defend Noa. She whispers “Can I hit him?” in her ear.  
“No, Édith. That creates a…”  
“Bad first impression, I know, I know. I still want to hit him.”  
“Me too, a little bit.”  
Édith laughs. “You couldn’t hit anyone.”  
“Maybe, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to.”  
Another boy walks over. “Sorry about him. I’m Kevin, and he’s an asshole.”  
“I prefer Nick.” The blonde guy protests.  
“I prefer asshole.” Noa smirks. Will falls over laughing at this.  
“Fucking roasted, man.”  
“Fine, fine, that was pretty good.”  
Noa is beginning to see how this works. It feels pretty sort of almost normal. Will grabs her arm.  
“I’m gonna go get a drink. You fit right in, though, see? I told you so.”  
“Fuck off, Will.”  
“Oooooh big scary naughty words.”  
“Will.” Noa glares, and Will skips off, dragging Nick along with her.  
The other guy, Kevin, is shorter. He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and Noa really really wants to know whether or not it’s ironic. It’s hot in here, she thinks, already feeling herself sweating a bit. She goes to put her hair up, brushing her bangs out of her face, when Édith taps her on the shoulder frantically.  
“Hmm?”  
“Your hair.” Édith is looking really worried.  
“It can’t look that bad.”  
Édith shakes her head. “No, it’s not that. It’s just, like…” she trails off, looking unsure of herself.  
“What?” Noa presses, getting a bit irritated now.  
“It’s blue.”  
“Blue? What are you talking about?”  
“More of a teal, really.” This comes from Kevin. They both jump. “What? I’ve been taking French forever. Sorry to interrupt. But yeah, your hair is definitely blue.”  
Noa rips the ponytail holder out of her head and stares at the ends. Blue. Why are they blue? Did I dye my hair and forget about it?  
“It wasn’t blue when we left the house, right?” Noa looks at Édith, trying desperately to confirm that yes, she has not intentionally dyed her hair.  
“No.”  
“Wait, you guys don’t know? Fucking Will, man, they never explain shit.” Kevin looks around for a minute before locating Will’s hair and shouting vaguely in its direction.  
It, with an excited Will attached, as usual, arrives a moment later. “You called?”  
“You didn’t tell them?”  
“I thought I’d wait until they figured it out.”  
“Figured what out?”  
“You guys are, like, witches, right?”  
Noa flinches. “How did you know?”  
“A couple of 16 year olds, living alone? It wasn’t a tough guess.”  
“Édith is 17.”  
“Whatever. So I brought you to a witch party without telling you. Sorry about that. I thought it would be a cool surprise, maybe.”  
Kevin has been studiously relaying this information to Édith, whose eyes are in turn getting wider as she looks around.  
“There are this many of us?” She asks in disbelief.  
Kevin grins. “Yeah. San Fran is a weird place, so we figured having open gatherings would be pretty cool because if we say ‘teen witches’ most people will assume that it doesn’t mean them and we’re just on drugs or hipsters or something.”  
Noa grins back at him. “That’s actually really cool.”  
“I thought so.”  
“So you started this?” Édith asks.  
“Me and Nick. He’s less of an asshole once you get to know him.”  
Édith raises her eyebrows, unconvinced.  
“So will he turn my hair back?”  
“Of course, let me ask him. It looks pretty cool, though.”  
Édith rolls her eyes. “It’s only in one spot.”  
“Do you think he could do the rest? Like just on the ends?” Noa’s never been allowed to dye her hair before, but she’s always thought it looked cool. Her mother thought it would cause too much damage and her abuela thought it looked trashy, but maybe magically-dyed hair isn’t like that, because her hair still feels pretty soft. Kevin looks surprised.  
“Most people are angrier when they find out he’s fucked with their hair.”  
“I mean, I’ve always wanted to dye my hair, and I’m not really one to get angry. It’s still a dick move, though.”  
Will comes over a moment later, dragging Nick along.  
Nick grins at Kevin, and grabs his face before he can duck away. He immediately sprouts a soul patch. He presses his hands to his face for a moment, and then tackles Nick, who is laughing too hard to fight back.  
Once they’ve gotten up and dusted themselves off, Noa bursts out with what she’s been waiting to say.  
“Will you dye the rest of my hair?”  
Nick looks surprised. “You’re not pissed?”  
“Well, kinda, but you can make it up to me. I just want the ends done.”  
“The same color as the first bit?”  
Noa nods, a bit nervous. Does he think I’m a freak? Was that the wrong thing to ask?  
He grins. “Well, shit, I’d be happy to. Nobody ever trusts me.”  
Kevin glares at him. “Don’t fuck it up. There’s a reason that nobody trusts you.”  
Nick has Noa turn around, and runs his fingers softly through the hair at the back of her head. She picks up a piece. It’s now a bright teal.  
“I can do your bangs, too, if you want. Or your eyebrows, maybe. I could even give you some nice arm hair.” He teases.  
She slaps his arm lightly and turns to Édith. “Does it look alright?”  
She studies Noa carefully for a second before nodding. “It suits you. I think you should keep it.”  
Will interjects, “Shit, mom’s gonna be pissed. She hates my hair enough, she’s going to think that I forced you to dye yours or something.”  
“I can always talk to her?” Noa offers.  
“Nah, don’t worry about it too much. It’s still pretty mild compared to what I have going on.”  
The party winds down, with Édith getting properly drunk because she can’t really communicate and feels awkward. Noa puts her to sleep on a couch. Most everyone has dispersed, and it’s just Will, Noa, a sleeping Édith, and Kevin. Nick was one of the last to leave, with a guy with one of the craziest mohawks Noa’s ever seen. She kind of wonders if he came to the party with it or not.  
They sit around the couches in one corner. Kevin puts on a Smiths album. They give him some shit about it. Noa likes it, though, and she’s glad that they leave it on.  
“Is it rude if I ask what your powers are?” Noa wonders aloud.  
“Some people are touchy about it.” Will replies, “But I don’t really mind. Especially because you’re new.”  
Kevin adds on, “I think that some people here still don’t know what they are, so they prefer not to be asked because they’re stressed about it. Some people also just don’t like what they can do, so they don’t really talk about it. And then you have people like Nick, who you don’t have to ask because he makes it known.”  
“What is Nick’s power, really?”  
Will cracks up. “Manipulating hair.”  
“It’s kind of the lamest power ever, honestly.” Kevin adds on.  
“How did he figure that out?” Maybe my power is something obscure like that, and I just don’t notice it yet.  
“Some people get urges to do stuff, right? So like, one day he got this really fucking strong urge to work in a hair salon, and I was like why the fuck would anyone let you near them with scissors, and he was like, I just need to work in a fucking hair salon, dude.” Kevin has clearly told this story hundreds of times.  
“So you knew him then? Like even before he knew what his power was?”  
“Yeah, man, we went to the same school, and we were kicked out within a day of each other, so we just kinda stuck together from then on.”  
“But don’t the rules say that you can’t contact anyone from your past?”  
“Fuck the rules.” Will says.  
“That was basically our philosophy, too.” Kevin says, and continues with his story. “So he applies to all these salons, right, and they don’t want a random teenager off of the street, but he really just wants to fucking cut hair, so I’m like, cut mine, and this dumbass touches it once and I get a giant bald spot. It looked like I had male pattern baldness.”  
Noa cracks up at the image. “Oooh, tough blow.”  
Will sighs wistfully. “What I wouldn’t give for a picture.”  
“So then I just kept letting him mess with my hair until he could control his powers better, and do color and shit.”  
“How long did it take?”  
“Honestly, maybe six months before he really understood what the hell he was doing and got good at it.”  
“How long has it been since you guys left home?”  
“Oh, we already came back. I’m gonna be eighteen in a few months. This is my uncle’s store.”  
“He just lets you have parties?”  
“Are you kidding?” Will asks. “We bring business way up. This store is the center of our culture, everybody comes here now. He couldn’t ask us to leave, he’d lose a ton of money.”  
Noa nods, slowly. “Fair enough. What can you do, Will?”  
“Me? Oh, I can make shit heal quick.”  
“That’s so cool.”  
Kevin rolls his eyes. “Will got the most useful power, and they use it for the dumbest things.”  
Will punches his arm. “Fuck off, dude, my use of my powers is totally valid.”  
“What do you use them for?” Noa asks.  
“I’m like, the biggest wimp ever,” Will laughs. “I use it to heal all of my body mods the minute I get out of the shop. Once I did it in the shop, by mistake, and freaked the piercer the fuck out. Couldn’t go back, like, for months.”  
“I think that’s a smart way to use it. Can you heal other people, too?”  
Kevin sighs. “They totally could, if they tried harder.”  
“Hey!” Will exclaims. “It’s tiring enough healing myself. It takes way too much focus to heal somebody else.”  
“What about you, Kevin?”  
“What about me?”  
“What can you do?”  
Noa doesn’t notice Will frantically shaking their head until it’s too late. Kevin looks down at his hands, visibly uncomfortable for the first time all night.  
Noa apologizes quickly. “I didn’t mean to pry.”  
“Don’t worry about it.” Kevin says, but it’s clear that he doesn’t want to see her anymore.  
Will helps her wake Édith up, and after thanking Kevin again, they drag her back to the apartment.  
“I feel so bad. I really think I offended Kevin.”  
“Don’t worry too much about it.” Will says. “He’s had a rough couple of years and he’s usually pretty good at hiding it. I think he was just kind of tired. He’s not going to be angry at you, though. I’m gonna go home before Mom kills me for being late. See you guys tomorrow. Tell Édith to have fun with her hangover.”  
Will leaves, and Noa keeps pacing the room. She’s way too wired to fall asleep, and she knows that she’s going to end up paying for it tomorrow, but for now she needs to go over everything that happened.  
It’s nice to know that there are other people like her and Édith, and that will has powers, but she feels awful about offending Kevin even though she doesn’t understand what she did. She decides not to ask anyone else about their powers in case they react like he did.  
The one thing that she still doesn’t get is how she’s going to figure out her power. That was the whole point in leaving, right? So that she could get out of the routine that she was falling into and struggle a bit more and learn more about what her ability could be. But she’s just fallen right back into a routine.  
I can’t help it. I keep doing this, and I still don’t feel like I’m doing it right. Édith and Nick both felt like they had to do something, like they were drawn to something out of the ordinary. I don’t have that yet. What if I never have it? What if there was some mistake and my mom has another daughter and I’ve done something wrong and it really should be her?  
Noa’s mind is racing a mile a minute trying to figure out what’s wrong with her. She isn’t aware that she’s fallen asleep until her alarm goes off, too loud for so early, and they have to get up for another day at work.  
Noa forces herself up off of the floor where she somehow managed to get herself to bed, and shakes Édith awake before taking a hot shower. They don’t have enough time to make breakfast, and barely make it to work on time as it is, stopping for a quick cup of coffee at the bakery across the street. They stop by every morning, and the barista makes their drinks without asking. They slide across the exact change and make it to work just before Marissa shows up.  
She smiles at them. “Did you girls have a nice night?”  
Noa nods, and they step inside, pulling off their jackets. Noa pulls her hair down from her hat and Marissa’s smile drops right off of her face. “I see you’ve changed your hair, Noa.”  
Édith has to stifle a laugh behind her hand. Will bounces in the door, distracting Marissa from the hair emergency.  
“Will, you’re late.” She admonishes.  
“Mom, nobody’s going to care about Noa’s hair. It’s honestly weirder not to have it dyed.”  
“It’s going to give people a bad impression of our shop. It’s bad enough when it was just you. What’s the point of having a dress code if nobody is going to look the same?”  
“Maybe she should dye her hair,” Édith whispers. “Then we’d all be cohesive again.”  
Marissa rounds on her. “Speak English. You’re in America now.”  
She stalks off to fix the window displays, leaving all three of her employees shocked.  
“I’ve never seen her like this.” Noa whispers to Will, later, when they’re restocking the shelves. “Did something happen?”  
Will nods solemnly. “My brother is coming home from school pretty soon. She always gets like this when he comes.”  
“Oh, why’s he coming home? I didn’t realize schools went on breaks this time of year.”  
Will grimaces. “They don’t. He was asked to leave once the semester ended, and he just finished his exams, so he’s coming back.”  
“Is he older or younger?”  
“Older, actually. By a couple years.”  
Noa nods slowly, trying to understand how Will wants her to react.  
“Has this happened before?”  
Will stares at her for a second.  
“Shit, I’m sorry, was that an awful thing to ask?”  
They shake their head. “Nah, it’s okay.” They laugh a bit, but it’s laced with bitterness like one of Édith’s bad moods, the kind that she keeps in jars in the fridge to ferment, the kind that make everything else go rotten faster and taste worse. “Yeah, it’s happened before.”  
Noa nods, knowing that sometimes the best thing to do when somebody is hurting is lend them your ear.  
“He was never all that interested in school, honestly, but he was pretty good at it. He got into really amazing schools, too, and he went to MIT first, and then CalPoly, and then even Yale for a little bit.”  
Noa’s eyes widen. She’s never heard of anyone going to so many different colleges, much less getting into those ones. Nobody from back home gets into more than a state school, except the one kid every few years who is so stellar that nobody can go near them.  
Noa always wanted to be that kid. The thought that Will’s brother had the chance to be, and chose to not put the effort in, horrifies her just a little bit.  
“Why did he switch schools so much?”  
“He said it was because none of them felt quite right.” Will rolls their eyes. “I don’t know, he never really gave a proper reason. So then, he decided that he was going to go to community college and my mom obviously wasn’t having it because she thought that it was for poor people or some other classist bullshit.”  
“But don’t you go to…” Noa trails off, as Will’s face scrunches up. It’s hard to tell if they’re more angry or sad.  
“Yeah. She doesn’t worry about me, though. Somebody has to help her keep the store open.”  
“Will.”  
“Look, she spends all of her fucking money sending my brother to these schools that he drops out of after less than a semester because she thinks that he can go places.”  
“Will.” Noa says again, but softer. She can’t think of a single thing to say, nothing that could make this better, nothing that could make this fair.  
“She keeps expecting him to do more, is the thing. I can’t even be angry, you know, because she’s got that eternal fucking optimism and she cares so fucking much and I don’t even know if I’m jealous, really, because I hate when she gets into that whole overbearing mom mode.” Will pauses, shaking their hair out of their face and breathing deeply. They pull their sleeves over their hands, bunch them into fists, and continue, pulling at the fabric as they speak.  
“It just hurts every time I see him because it’s like a reminder of everything that I can’t do because I’m stuck here. And I want to hate him, but I can’t.”  
“Because you miss him too much in the spaces in between.” Will looks up, staring at Noa. Noa smiles, softly. “I have a younger sister, and she gets most of the attention. She’s prettier and smarter and more popular and I know that it isn’t the same thing, not at all, but…” She doesn’t really know how to finish her point. What if Will thinks that she’s trying to hijack the conversation and turn the topic to her self? She just wants Will to know how much they matter. “I don’t know. All I’m trying to say is that you’re not alone, okay? I care about you and Édith cares about you and everyone at that party cares about you and you helped build that community that meant the world to me. Look, if your brother doesn’t want to do anything with himself, that’s up to him, I guess. You can do everything that you can to discourage him, but it’s okay to focus on yourself. And you aren’t doing nothing. You’re still in school, you’re still working, you’re still the life of every room that I see you in.”  
Will presses their sleeves to their eyes.  
“Don’t cry, you’ll run your eyeliner.”  
“Fuck off,” Will says shakily. “It adds to the aesthetic.”  
And just like that, they’re back, turning away to stock shelves, and when they joke with the customers, it sounds a little strained to Noa, but nobody else really seems to notice.  
Noa rejoins Édith at the counter, helping her explain to a very tired-looking woman that the toy store a couple blocks away is probably more suited to a child’s birthday gift than this store is.  
“You mean you don’t carry toys?” She asks, looking more resigned than angry.  
“No ma’am.” Noa replies. “Good luck, though.”  
The woman nods, looking at Édith like she’s never seen a person before. “I’m just a little out of it, today.” She says.  
When she leaves, Noa hugs Édith softly, for lack of anything else to hold on to.  
“I don’t know what we’re doing here.”  
It’s a melancholy kind of afternoon, with Marissa having tired herself out from the morning’s nitpicking, and Will, Noa, and Édith all attempting to nurse their hangovers without her noticing. 

Chapter 6: Édith  
Noa seemed lonely today. She gave more hugs that I’ve ever seen her give. I think that she’s worried about Will. Édith still doesn’t have the energy to think in anything more than very simple sentences. She woke up with the worst headache that she’d had in years, wanting nothing more than to lie back on her pillows and go to sleep. She hasn’t had a morning shift in the years that she lived alone. She hasn’t really even been getting up at a consistent hour since before she dropped out of school.  
Routine has never been something that she’s thrived off of, not in the same way that Noa does. She doesn’t like America as much as the movies led her to believe that she would. Then again, she’s seen the way American movies look at her hometown, and it’s much the same. Paris is the city of love, the city of light and life, certainly not the city of backstreets that smell like piss and tourists crawling everywhere.  
She pictured herself, when they left France, relaxing on the beach in California. She pictured celebrities and pretty girls and prettier boys, and teen drama, and high school, and meeting people with incredible talents, and she knew on the surface that absolutely none of this was realistic or accurate, and even if it was for some people, that she wouldn’t be so lucky. It was a nice dream, though.  
It’s a nice dream to hang on to when her hangover breath won’t go away, no matter how many breath mints she eats, regardless of the fact that she brushed her teeth in the morning.  
She’s still scattered, with the sour taste in her mouth. When Marissa screams, she hears it like she’s underwater, like it doesn’t mean anything. Her English is getting good, is getting better than anyone realizes, but at this point she chooses not to show it because she’d rather not impress people. Once you impress them once, that becomes the norm that they think of you until you don’t meet it and disappoint them.  
So she gets a copy of Les Mis in the original French, opens it to a random page, and puts a slimmer paperback inside in English. It isn’t subtle, but it’s enough to make Noa gently prod her to the English section and remind her that she needs to study. It’s enough to make Marissa roll her eyes and mutter about immigrants under her breath because she’s never liked Édith.  
It’s enough to keep expectations just as low as they need to be for her to feel comfortable.  
She runs through last night in her mind, runs through being confused at anything beyond the pleasantries, despite having been able to read fluently yesterday. She met the boy, the one who spoke to her in French, even with his atrocious accent, and his friend, who changed Noa’s hair. And they didn’t question her, didn’t look her up and down with the same sort of scrutiny that she’s used to, didn’t ask what she was or how she defined herself. It was kind of nice. It wasn’t nice enough to stop her from drinking.  
She can’t get used to America, doesn’t know how to ask for a fake ID like in every teen movie, can’t get used to the fact that she doesn’t know which bars will and won’t serve her. So there’s a table, with the red cups that she’s only ever seen in photos, and when a girl with a shaved head and dyed eyebrows offers to fill it, she doesn’t object. Not the first time, or the second, or the fifth, when she realizes that she should stop. It felt good, though, to be lighter than normal, to not have to think about the bills they had to pay or the language that she has to learn or the culture she doesn’t know how to adjust to yet.  
Drinking, she knows.  
She knows having a glass of wine with dinner, knows asking for a taste, knows the first time that a taste meant a whole glass. She knows shitty bar, shitty music way too loud, not sure how you got home. She knows drinking alone, too, better than she wishes. She knows spiking her own drinks with warmth, with happiness, with fulfillment, with intoxication if she wanted to get the job done in a hurry.  
She knows party, too, although she felt a little rusty on that one. She fell back into her skill set pretty well, though, with dance moves that were more silly than anything and a smile that got her just one more drink against anyone’s better judgement.  
She knows the dizziness that comes after, although she always manages to convince herself that this one time she’s going to be exempt.  
It was easy to pass out, and let Noa drag her back home. She hasn’t had somebody to do that in a long time, and she figured it would be nice to take advantage of the fact that she does now. Édith really does miss being a kid more than she’d like to admit. She misses feeling smart when she could pass a test, and going to school and feeling excited about it, and being angry at her parents, and having somebody to take care of her. So she let herself get drunk, knowing that Noa would take care of her, and that sometimes it feels nice to have somebody bother to wake you up after they drag you home and give you shit through your headache.  
Noa seems to have made friends last night. As much as it’s nice to have each other, it feels good to know that they have other people, too. And that boy that she met, Kevin, she hopes that they can spend more time together. He spoke French to her. That means the world.  
When the workday ends, Édith feels a little bit less out of it and a lot better, when Noa pokes her in the arm. She pulls out her ear buds.  
“What’s up?”  
“Will invited us for dinner.”  
Édith really just wants to crash. “Do we have to? I have a movie I want to see and…”  
Noa cuts her off. “We really should go.”  
Édith is a little bit taken aback. Noa rarely if ever forces people to do anything that they don’t want to do. She’s perhaps the least confrontational person that Édith knows, not that Édith really knows people.  
“Why?”  
Noa sighs, walking as fast as her legs will carry her. Édith has to hurry to catch up, despite being almost a foot taller and given to walking quickly as a general rule.  
“Will’s brother is coming home.”  
Édith wrinkles her nose. “Will has a brother?”  
“His name is Eric. Will’s pretty stressed. I think that we should be there.”  
She hurries off, cutting off Édith’s questions about why he’s visiting and what he does and if that’s the reason that Marissa was so stressed out in the morning.  
They change out of their work clothes, and while Édith is getting dressed, she can hear Noa on the phone, attempting to reassure Will that they’ll be there soon and yes they can wear nice clothes and yes they are sure that they can come and no they won’t piss off Marissa.  
They hurry, pulling on dresses quickly and lacing up shoes and putting on the makeup that they skipped in the morning in favor of getting there on time. They check themselves in the mirror leaning against the wall one more time, and practically run to Marissa’s house.  
She opens the door, and they try hard not to look like they were just panting.  
“Hello girls,” she says, looking irritated that they had the gall to show up. “May I inquire as to what you’re doing here?”  
Noa plays with her hands, like she always does when she’s nervous.  
“We’re here for dinner? Sorry, Will said it was okay.”  
Marissa’s face twists into a scowl, although she works hard to keep her polite hostess smile on. “Just a moment, please.”  
They hear her screaming up the stairs to Will. Édith can’t quite make out exactly what she’s saying, but the message is clear: she doesn’t want them here. She walks back to the door, and opens it.  
“I didn’t realize that Will had invited you two. Come on in.”  
Will comes down the stairs, looking extremely uncomfortable in a dress.  
They whisper to Noa and Édith, “Mom said you two could stay if I changed.”  
Édith whispers back, in her best English, “We can leave?”  
They both turn to look at her. Noa switches to French. “You understood that?”  
Édith nods. “I’ve been doing my best to learn.”  
Will shakes their head rapidly. “Don’t go. I need you here.”  
The doorbell rings, and they spin around, still standing in the entrance. They move out of Marissa’s way as she bustles through to the entrance and pulls the door open.  
Her face splits into a massive smile, the only time that Édith thinks she’s ever seen Marissa smile and actually look happy.  
She gives the guy who enters a hug before he can get the door closed.  
“I’m so happy you’re home.” She says, muffled by his shoulder. She lets him go, pulling out a tissue to blot her eye makeup.  
He takes a second to get his bearings before giving Will a hug, too, although this one is quicker.  
“Hey, little sister.”  
She glares at him, and says a quick, frosty hello before retreating into the kitchen with Noa and Édith before they can be introduced.  
Édith has seen Will be misgendered before, but she’s never seen them react in this way. Their shoulders are slumped, and they look a bit like they’re about to pass out. Usually, they’re the first person to fight, to get up and scream in somebody’s face, to force people to hear them even if the people don’t want to listen.  
She’s never seen Will look this tired. They sit on the kitchen counter and poke at the food for dinner. Noa looks around the kitchen for ways to help, and immediately starts setting the table. Édith goes and puts a hand on Will’s shoulder. She digs around the kitchen, hoping that she can mix something, anything to help will out.  
She finds a couple dried herbs in the cabinet, a bag of mint tea, some cold filtered water, throws it in a pan on the stove. Will ignores the two of them, moving around her kitchen. They look absolutely miserable, straining to hear their mother in the living room and trying not to listen at the same time.  
Noa goes over and places her hand on Will’s arm, guides them to a chair. They calm down a little bit, and Édith finishes straining her makeshift potion and hands it to Will.  
“It won’t work as well as what I make at home,” she says, as softly as she can, “but it should help you calm down.”  
Will doesn’t pause before downing the whole thing. Their shoulders relax a bit. “Thanks.” They say. “I’ll be right back.”  
Édith and Noa look at each other for a second, before Noa turns back to cleaning up the kitchen, having moved on to washing dishes once she’s run out of other chores.  
“What did you make her?” Noa asks.  
“A little bit of calm. I didn’t have quite the right stuff, though, so I’m really hoping it’s going to help anyway.”  
“That’s good. I’m worried about them.”  
“Me too, honestly.” Édith says. “What did you do to them, though?”  
Noa furrows her brows.  
“What do you mean?”  
“I don’t know, you touched them and they seemed to, like, calm down a little bit.”  
Noa looks worried. “I don’t think that I did anything, honestly. I just felt like they needed some kind of contact. Besides, they were focusing way too much on trying to hear what was going on in the other room so they just needed that off of their mind.”  
Édith nods slowly. Maybe that has something to do with Noa’s powers. She thinks. It doesn’t make sense to calm down just because you were touched on the shoulder. and she said that she felt it.  
Édith doesn’t want to distract Noa. They can talk about it later. Really, they just have to get through tonight.  
Dinner is awkward, to say the least. The conversation is stilted, and although Will seems less on edge, they also don’t seem to be aware of much of the conversation, either. Édith winces every time Marissa has to repeat something, knowing that it’s probably her fault for making the calm a bit too calm.  
Eric seems pretty nice, but something about him sets Édith’s teeth on edge. He laughs too loud for it to be real and talks about dropping out like it means nothing and makes fun of what he calls the “cultural experience of university”, a phrase that Édith doesn’t need to fully understand to know it’s full of pretension, and he makes Noa shrink down because every time she talks he talks over her.  
Marissa is still glowing just from being in his presence, despite them arguing before dinner. As soon as it’s over, the two girls head home, giving Will hugs on the way out.  
As soon as they’ve left the building, Noa is shaking with anger.  
“He just made me want to fucking scream.” Noa shouts into the night.  
Édith is a bit worried. Noa doesn’t get angry. Noa doesn’t swear.  
“Are you okay?” She asks tentatively.  
“I can’t believe him.” She shakes her head. “Did you see what a mess Will was when he showed up? Did you see how he misgendered them? Did you see how they didn’t even argue with him? That must mean that he does it all the time.” She shakes her head again like she can’t comprehend it. “How can he misgender them like that? They’re family. That’s not how you treat your family.”  
Édith sighs. “You’re pretty lucky, though, Noa.”  
Noa blushes. “I guess so. It shouldn’t be luck, though, to have a family that treats you like a goddamn person.” She shivers.  
“No. It shouldn’t.”  
“I know you think I’m naïve.”  
“No, I don’t” I know you are. She thinks, and then, when did I get so goddamn jaded.  
They get home, having walked the rest of the way in a tense, tired silence.

Chapter 7: Noa  
Last night was a massive disaster. Noa’s heart aches for Will, wants nothing more than to pull them out of their home, let them move in. But she knows just as well that all that does is force Will to lose their job and drop out of school, and that it would probably lose Noa and Édith their jobs, too.  
Noa can’t lose her job, she knows, but she would kill for a way to help. When she texts Will, later that night, Will says that it’s normal, that it’s okay, that he’s just going to be moving on to a new school next month, another Ivy League or top fifty, another one of Will’s dream schools.  
They talked to him, a little bit, about the misgendering, and he said that Will will always be his little sister, said that he can’t and won’t do anything about that fact.  
Noa can feel the bitterness through her phone, asks Édith if tomorrow they can bring Will some potions that will get them through the time that Eric is there.  
Édith had already packed a bag.  
Noa is sitting at the counter, tapping out a rhythm. The latest best seller isn’t quite holding her attention. Her mind wanders back to last night, to what Édith said in the kitchen.  
What did she mean, what did I do to Will?  
She wonders. Édith seemed so surprised, like she was holding something back. It’s the same face that she makes when she wants Noa to translate but doesn’t want to interrupt, the same face that she makes when people try to strike up conversation but she can’t figure out the right time to tell them that she doesn’t understand, the same face that she makes when she just wants to tell Will to take a goddamn shower before they come to work but doesn’t feel like it’s her place.  
Noa hates getting that look.  
Everyone says that you’ll get some kind of compulsion. She thinks. What if that was mine? All I wanted to do in that moment was reach out and touch Will.  
That doesn’t mean anything, though. That’s what friends want to do. They want to comfort each other. I was just being a friend.  
Noa realizes that she’s been tuning out the whole world, and that there’s been a customer calling her.  
“I’m terribly sorry, sir.” She exclaims, and runs over to help him find a list of classic literature that she and Édith privately refer to as the ‘nobody has actually read these and liked them’ collection.  
Once he’s stocked up on his Proust and Nabokov, she sits back down on her stool behind the counter, counts herself lucky that Marissa wasn’t there to see that, and goes back to thinking.  
How do I know the difference between wanting to do something and being compelled to do it? Is there a difference?  
All of this is so confusing. Why hasn’t anyone published a guide on how to figure this out? Why didn’t my mother explain more?  
She can’t think of her mother. She feels the tears starting up, and pushes the thought away, wishing that she didn’t cry so easily. She can just barely hear Marissa’s voice from the upstairs office. She sounds like she’s angry. Noa can’t quite make it out.  
She closes her eyes, and listens, hard. She knows that it’s wrong, but the tugging in her stomach is back, telling her that this is something she needs to hear more than anything.  
All of a sudden, Marissa is screaming in her ear. She screws her eyes shut tighter.  
“…CAN’T BELIEVE THAT YOU WOULD DO THAT! REALLY, THAT WAS COMPLETELY INNAPROPRIATE.”  
Will’s voice chimes in now, quieter, shakier. “Mom, please.”  
“DON’T SPEAK TO ME LIKE THAT. THIS WAS A FAMILY NIGHT, A FAMILY MATTER. YOU HAD NO RIGHT WHATSOEVER TO INVITE MY EMPLOYEES INTO MY HOME.”  
“It’s my home too.” Will is getting a bit louder, now. “And you said that I could have friends over.”  
“You should not be friends with them.” Marissa isn’t yelling anymore. Her voice is ice cold, is stone, is meant to cut deep. She’s really angry now, Noa thinks. What does she mean, you can’t be friends with them?  
Will is whispering, now, and Noa strains to listen a bit more.  
“Why aren’t my friends good enough?”  
She hears Marissa sighing, a sharp, angry exhale of breath. “We’ll discuss this later.”  
When Will slams the door, the noise hits Noa so hard that she falls out of her chair.  
When Will comes downstairs, face nearly purple with rage, throws open the shop door, and starts running, Noa wants to chase them. She starts to get back up, when Marissa comes down the stairs behind her.  
“Don’t go after her.”  
Noa bites her tongue, forcing herself not to correct Marissa on Will’s pronouns. Forcing herself not to correct Marissa on the way that she’s raising her kid. She edges towards the door.  
Marissa turns around to leave. As she’s going, she turns back around.  
“If you leave now, don’t bother coming back.”  
Noa sits back down, heavily.  
She wants to go after Will. She wants to keep her job.  
She texts Will, but after 10 minutes they haven’t responded. She tells Marissa she’s taking her break, and Marissa tells her that the statement still holds. Don’t leave the shop.  
Noa doesn’t.  
She finds Édith, who is sleeping in the stock room. She stands over her for a minute, not sure whether to shake her awake or not.  
Last night, Édith didn’t even seem to care about Will, didn’t seem to care about the way that their family was mistreating them.  
Noa doesn’t understand how she couldn’t care. Didn’t she go through the same thing? Wouldn’t she understand better than Noa ever could?  
Why doesn’t Will just leave? Noa wonders. Why doesn’t she stand up to them? Why doesn’t she do anything to change the situation?  
Édith called her naïve. It’s not naïve to be optimistic, is it?  
People can change. Family is supposed to be there for you, no matter what. We just need to find a way to convince Marissa that it’s her responsibility to take care of Will. Your kids should never be a burden. You chose to have them. They didn’t choose to be had, or choose the situation that they were born in to. They didn’t get to choose their body, or their gender, or their sexuality.  
Why do you, as a parent, think that you are entitled to choosing to ignore things that they can’t change?  
Noa can think of a million different ways to tell Marissa that she should make an effort to understand her kid, but absolutely none detailing or in any way relating to ways that Marissa might consider listening to.  
Noa has never been the one to confront people.  
All she’s ever wanted was to make people happy, to not be a disappointment. All she wants to do is help Will, to somehow make Marissa understand that Will is more than her daughter.  
That will isn’t her daughter at all.  
Noa goes back into the room, and shakes Édith awake.  
“Will’s run off and Marissa won’t let me leave.”  
Édith rubs the sleep from her eyes. “What do you mean, Will’s gone?”  
“Like, they had an argument with Marissa and ran off and aren’t answering any of my texts kind of gone.”  
Édith sits up, stretches slightly, and holds out her hand. Once Noa’s pulled her up, she nods a few times, yawns again, and walks out to the front of the shop.  
“Any idea where she went?”  
Noa shakes her head furiously. “No. Are you doing to go look?”  
Édith nods, still not quite awake.  
“If Marissa freaks out, tell her I went home sick. I’ll text you if I find them.”  
She walks out, looks around a few times, and ambles off down the street. Noa doesn’t know if she trusts Édith to find Will, much less be aware enough of her surroundings that she doesn’t get hit with a car, but it’s better than waiting and wondering about what on earth Will might be doing.  
The bell chimes, and Noa looks up to see Eric walking in. He strides over to Noa like he owns the place, and hold out his hand. Noa doesn’t know whether he expects her to shake it or kiss it, so she just glares at him a little bit until he puts it back in his pocket.  
“Is my mom around?” He asks, without greeting her. Noa thinks privately that her abuela could happily teach him a thing or two about proper manners.  
“I think so. She’s probably upstairs, if you’re looking for her.” She doesn’t want to drag out this conversation for any longer than she needs to.  
“What about Will and your friend? The tall blonde dude, right?”  
Noa glares at him openly, now. Is he entitled enough to intentionally mess up or is he just stupid? She wonders, using every ounce of self control that her body can hold not to ask him out loud.  
She settles for raising her eyebrows and talking very slowly, the way that she would talk to little kids when they got angry, back when she used to babysit.  
“You mean Édith.”  
“Yeah, the blonde guy. I thought Édith was a girl’s name, though.” He shrugs.  
Noa doesn’t know how she can spell it out short of yelling in his face.  
“It is.” She says, as frosty as she can manage. She knows that she isn’t really intimidating. Being short and still soft of chubby and having a high voice hardly lends itself very well to scaring people off. He proves this, grinning.  
“Ouch. Whatever did I do to make you hate me so?”  
She doesn’t blink. “Can I help you with anything?”  
He laughs at her. “Nope. Just came to annoy you.” He says, and wanders off.  
“You’re doing a great fucking job.” She says, under her breath.  
She wants nothing more than for her shift to end.  
She texts Édith under the desk, asking for any news of Will’s whereabouts.  
Édith texts back a couple minutes later.  
“Nothing yet.”  
And then another one comes.  
“Stop worrying.”  
Noa scrunches up her forehead and massages her temples. What if we can’t find them?  
Somewhere in the back of her head, there’s her rational side telling her that Will is probably just with a friend, that they’ve lived here for ages and know their way around, that they can take care of themself.  
More of her brain is telling her that Will is facedown dead in a ditch.  
More of her brain is screaming about the fact that she might not be found.  
She finishes her shift, mostly by watching the clock. She works on autopilot, barely even hears when people speak to her, ignores every time Eric passes by the counter, trying desperately to get noticed.  
He gets bored eventually, and goes upstairs to talk to his mother. When they argue, Noa doesn’t listen, just focuses on her nails tapping the counter in front of her. Marissa doesn’t notice that most of her staff is missing.  
It’s a slow day for customers, anyway.  
Noa takes off as fast as she possibly can, going home at a run, making it down the hill in record time. She puts her feet one in front of the other, and doesn’t look up until she’s back in the apartment, panting.  
Édith is sitting on the floor, quietly watching a movie on her computer. Will is asleep on Noa’s bed.  
When Noa puts her bag down, Édith looks up, startled, and puts a finger to her lips without pulling out her ear buds.  
Now Noa’s actually getting pretty angry. She stalks over to Édith as silently as she can so as to not wake Will up.  
When she pulls out Édith’s ear buds, she looks shocked, and opens her mouth to argue.  
Noa silences her.  
“Have you two eaten?”  
She shakes her head mutely.  
“Come on, we’re going to pick up food.”  
Neither of them say a word until they get out of the building, with Noa cutting Édith off every time that she tries to begin speaking.  
Once they’re standing outside, she turns sharply to her.  
“Édith, what the fuck?”  
“What do you mean?”  
“Why didn’t you text me that you got them home safely.”  
Édith looks shocked, and pulls out her phone. She looks through her texts, and blushes scarlet. “I’m so sorry, I must have forgotten. I swear I remember texting you.”  
Noa is still angry though, so she pushes it.  
“You forgot? I can’t believe you!”  
Édith stands there, looking down at Noa, and for a moment Noa wants nothing more than to punch her.  
“What do you want for dinner?” She doesn’t mean for it to come out as loud or as sharp as it does, and Édith seems slightly taken aback by the sudden change of topic.  
“What?”  
Noa repeats herself, slower this time. “What should we get for dinner?”  
“Oh. I don’t know.”  
Noa sighs. “What does Will like?”  
Édith shakes her head. “I don’t think that we should wake them up, tonight, and even if they do wake up I doubt that they’ll be hungry.”  
“What happened?” In the midst of her angry, Noa forgot to be worried about where Édith found Will in the first place.  
“I’m not sure if they’d want me to tell you. I think that it’s their place to tell.”  
Noa nods, biting her lip. “Okay. That’s fair. Just-“  
Édith looks away. “Just what?”  
“Please tell me that they’re okay.”  
Édith shakes her head sadly.  
“Honestly, I don’t know.”  
They walk to the shitty Italian restaurant that they know Will likes for some reason, and order more food then anyone is planning on eating. Neither of them are hungry, really, but it’s an excuse to only talk about what’s at hand and focus on reading the menu even though they’ve been here dozens of times, even though they know exactly what they’re going to get before they even walk in the door.  
They don’t look at each other.  
Chapter 8: Édith  
When she was taking a nap in the storeroom and Noa shook her awake, Édith had never seen her look so worried. Not even when Édith asked if she was a witch.  
So she did her best to shake off the sleep, although she didn’t manage it very well, and listened to Noa’s panicky explanation about why she doesn’t know where Will is and why she might get fired, and then walked out of the store.  
Once she was out of view, she stopped at the first café she found, sat down, and ordered an espresso. Significantly more awake but grimacing at the taste, she left the café and started walking. She remembered Will talking about their school, saying that maybe Édith should take some classes.  
Noa had to translate. Édith has the name in the notes of her phone, and google maps pulled up. She has to take two buses and a trolley to get there, and it takes way too long to find it. She whole time, she was going over other possibilities in her head. The whole time, she was worrying that Will wouldn’t be there and that she would have wasted hours.  
When she got there, she realized that she had no idea whatsoever where Will might be or what classes they took. She tried to ask the harried receptionist for any advice, but her English wasn’t translating and the woman wasn’t really bothering to listen, so she just walked in like she knew what she was doing, and started looking into any open room that she could find.  
When she walked into the arts section, she remembered Will’s bedroom, the posters on their wall and the tripod set up in the corner. Hoping that her hunch was right, she followed it into the arts wing, into the room marked film.  
She walked in and flicked the lights on.  
The walls were covered with posters from every film imaginable, with shelving housing a library of DVD’s. A pair of large tables shoved together, covered in film books and action figures and surrounded by rolling chairs dominated the center of the room. There was a teacher’s desk in the corner, with another layer of clutter so thick that you could hardly see the desk beneath it.  
She heard a muffled sound, and looked down. Will was scrunched up under the table, looking like they had been crying, with a couple of magazines spread out in front of them.  
“Will?” Édith said, tentatively.  
Will shook their head. “Go away.”  
“Will, you need to come home.”  
“No I don’t.” They shake their head again, stronger this time.  
“Noa’s worried sick.” Will shakes their head, but looks a bit guilty. Édith takes this as progress, and continues. “Do you want to come out from under there?” She winces, realizing that this sounds like the placating kind of question that she would have hated being asked as a child.  
Will shakes their head stubbornly.  
“Fine.” Édith says, deciding that if Will was going to be a child, then she would do the same. “I’m coming in.”  
She ducked down under the table and crawled over to reach Will in the center.  
Will was visibly trying not to laugh. “I didn’t think you would actually fit.”  
“It’s pretty tight.” Édith admitted. “Do you want to tell me what happened?”  
Any trace of happiness disappeared from Will’s face.  
“Not really, no.” They smiled, but it was more bitter than anything else.  
Édith nodded. “Okay.”  
Will looked like they were waiting for Édith to say something more, but she didn’t.  
“What are you reading?”  
“I didn’t grab any of my stuff, so I just picked a random magazine from the table.”  
They were full of old film reviews, stuff that Édith knew Will had seen months ago.  
She picked one up and began to read. The English was pretty incomprehensible. She knew some of the words, but not enough to fill in the gaps between reading and understanding.  
She asked Will every time she missed a word, which was pretty often. Will told her.  
Sometimes it’s that simple. After they finished the article, Will started to get up.  
Édith wasn’t expecting this, but she had been hoping for it.  
She followed Will as they got up and walked out of the school. They ended up getting on the varieties of public transport that it required to get home in total silence.  
It was easier that way.  
Will didn’t seem inclined to do or say much of anything, so they just kept going.  
When they got off, Édith just kept following Will until they reached Marissa’s house.  
They walked in, and Édith found herself praying that Marissa wouldn’t have gotten home yet, as she had no idea what time it was.  
They went upstairs, and Will started packing a bag.  
Édith didn’t say anything, just sat on Will’s bed and watched as they folded up a few pieces of clothing and shoved them into a sports duffel. Their camera was packed neatly into a bag, and the tripod folded into a smaller bundle.  
They took the posters off the walls and shoved them in the recycling.  
They stripped the bed of the sheets and comforter, folded them, and put them gently back into the linen closet.  
Will only spoke to ask Édith if she was tall enough to scrape the plastic stars off of their ceiling.  
They moved the books off of the bookshelf and into the storage room in the attic, carrying armfuls at a time and cursing the flight of stairs that it took to get there. When they finished, Will’s room didn’t look like nobody had ever been there, as they were maybe hoping.  
It looked like there was the ghost of what had been.  
The posters left square markings on the wall. The stains in the carpet were still there. The stars had stubbornly refused to let go of their hold on the ceiling, and so they had left them there.  
The room looked sad.  
Will nodded determinedly. They spoke up for what felt like the first time in hours.  
“Can I stay with you tonight?”  
Édith nodded, wordless.  
She had thought that Will would just assume they would take her in, but they had asked. They doubted it.  
“Of course.”  
They walked back, Will’s whole life in their sports duffel, in their backpack with the seams splitting from the stuff that they just couldn’t give up.  
It looked a little too familiar to Édith.  
She didn’t say anything.  
They walked back, and Will started up a documentary on their laptop.  
When they fell asleep on Édith’s lap, she moved their head gently to the pillow, moved to the other side of the room, and plugged in her ear buds to continue the movie.  
It was easier that way.  
When Noa got home, she was angry and hurt and clearly felt left out.  
They walked together to the Italian place, and for what felt like the millionth time that day, Édith didn’t have anything to say.  
She answered the questions that Noa put to her, no more and no less.  
Will would talk about it when they felt like it was the time. Until then, they needed food on the table and to get up the next day and look for a new job, maybe.  
The three of them could save money. They could find a bigger apartment. It would be okay, Édith told herself.  
Tomorrow, she just needed to begin convincing Noa of that.  
She wakes up tired, confused about where she is, a little bit chilly, a little bit early, which never happens. When she sits up to stretch, she realizes that she’s actually sleeping on the floor, not the almost on the floor that is where she usually sleeps.  
She remembers last night, remembers giving Noa her bed because Will was in Noa’s.  
Her stomach grumbles. They didn’t eat the food they bought.  
Édith was too tired and Noa too frustrated.  
She lets Noa and Will sleep in until the alarm goes off, while she showers and gets dressed and does her makeup better than usual and eats.  
She hopes that maybe Marissa won’t notice that she didn’t work all day yesterday and left super early, but just in case, she puts on her favorite skirt, just so she can have something good happen in case something bad does.  
She’s always believed that it’s smarter to be pessimistic, smarter to be prepared for the worst case or be pleasantly surprised if everything isn’t awful, so she thinks through what her skills are and what she can do in the case that she walks into work and gets told to walk back out again.  
Noa’s alarm goes off, and they sit together at the table, eating breakfast. Will wakes up a bit later, confused.  
“Why didn’t you guys wake me up? I’m not going to have time to shower.”  
Noa and Édith share a look of confusion.  
“Are you going somewhere?” Édith asks.  
Will nods. “I can’t afford to lose my job and she can’t afford to fire me.”  
Noa still doesn’t know what happened yesterday.  
“So are you going back home? Is it just going to go back to normal? Because honestly I know it’s not my place but that really isn’t healthy and…”  
Will cuts her off. “I’m not going back home. I’ll be out of your hair as soon as I have somewhere else to stay.”  
Noa shakes her head furiously.  
“You can’t leave here. Where else will you go?”  
Édith tries to stop Noa from saying this, scared that it’ll make Will feel worse. Will looks at the ground.  
“I’ll figure something out, okay?”  
Noa looks like she isn’t done with the discussion, so Édith cuts it off before it can start.  
“You better go shower so we can get to work on time, dude.”  
“Fuck off.” Will snipes back, but without any of the usual venom. They go to shower, and the trio walk to work together. Marissa looks up when they come in, looks them straight up and down, nods, and tells Will to tuck in their shirt.  
From then on, it’s pretty clear. Just as Will doesn’t want anything to do with Marissa anymore, Marissa feels the same way. They don’t need a family relationship, just a working one.  
Édith doesn’t want to recognize the situation. She doesn’t want to know how it feels to fight with your family, to have to leave, to be misgendered constantly.  
Still, she can’t help but feel lucky that the situations aren’t exactly the same. When she ran from her mother, she ran across the world. They don’t have to see each other every day.  
Édith doesn’t have to look in either of her parent’s faces in the morning and worry about what’s going to come out of their mouths. In an unfortunate kind of way, she feels like that’s an accomplishment.  
A small blessing, as Noa would say.  
Noa, though, looks terrified, clearly feeling caught in the middle. To hear her tell it, she’s never had a fight with her mother in her life, much less been forced to leave for anything other than the tradition.  
She has that luxury of knowing that there’s somewhere that she can go home to at the end of the year.  
Édith lost that the day that she left. Will lost it yesterday.  
Noa hasn’t lost it yet. Édith is kind of angry, kind of jealous, and mostly hopes for her sake that she never will.

Chapter 9: Noa  
So Will is living with them, now. So everything has changed, because now they have to pay less for rent, and they have to share the space that was too cramped already, and there’s one more person to please when they figure out what they’re going to eat for dinner, and Noa has to get up just a bit earlier because there’s one more person to shower who wants some of the hot water.  
And nothing changes. It’s still the same Édith, the same Will, the same job, the same monotony that sets back in after the initial excitement.  
Will isn’t quite the same Will, if Noa is being honest with herself. They’re quieter, more subdued, more likely to follow the rules of any given situation. They go to school before and after work, and they pay exactly their share of everything, and they go through every day like clockwork.  
On the outside, they look like they’re functioning almost better than before.  
Noa and Édith know differently, and they can’t help but worry when Will goes to bed at 10 pm, and pays the rent on time, and looks their mother in the eyes and makes pleasant conversation. Will isn’t reserved and logical: they’re loud, and obnoxious, and prone to doing stupid things just because they don’t want to fall into any sort of routine. It was hardly Noa’s favorite thing, but she misses it.  
She wants a little noise in her life.  
Noa’s mind keeps returning to the day that Will ran away. Édith still won’t tell her how she found Will, and Noa decided to give up on asking after a while. It was way easier to just let herself wonder what had happened then cause a series of arguments or potentially upset Will.  
But she can’t stop thinking about the day, and about what she overheard.  
Come to think of it, how did she overhear? It isn’t like Marissa is particularly inclined to speak over a polite volume, and even when she does yell, it’s always when she’s absolutely sure that nobody is listening, just so that she doesn’t disturb the peace, or more importantly disturb anyone’s image of her as peaceful, not that she’s fooling anyone who’s known her for longer than five minutes.  
Noa pulls her mind back to the intended train of thought.  
How did she hear their conversation? Especially when they started to whisper.  
She tried her best to remember exactly how she felt. It was almost like she couldn’t stop herself from doing it, even though she knew it was wrong.  
She just felt like she needed to listen.  
Noa thinks back to the party, weeks ago. Thinks back to when she asked them, over and over, “how will I know? When will I be able to tell?”  
She thinks back to Kevin, thinks back to how sad he seemed, thinks back to what he said. “You won’t be able to control it.” He had told her, as she was leaving. “When it comes, it won’t be because you wanted it to.”  
She had nodded at the time, focusing more on getting Édith home without having her arrested for underage public intoxication.  
Was that me using my powers?  
It feels bizarre to even think it.  
What does that mean for my power? She thinks. What does that mean that it is?  
She’s not sure that she wants to find out, but she doesn’t think that it puts anyone in danger.  
What is it, anyway? She wonders. Is it just being able to listen to things? I could hear them when I shouldn’t have been able to. They weren’t too far away. Does that mean that I can make things louder? Can I make things quieter, too?  
She closes her eyes, and listens hard, trying to pick something out. She’s in the store, working a slow shift, but she knows that a while ago there was a customer that went upstairs. Maybe they’re still in the shop.  
She listens hard, and hears the faint sound of tinny music, like someone is next to her, playing something on their headphones just a bit too loud.  
Noa thinks back to when she was in choir back in middle school, and the teacher told her to picture the notes as a glowing line, going higher or lower. It didn’t help much at the time, as she was pretty much just tone-deaf, but she tries it now, picturing the sound as a soft glow. She squeezes her eyes shut as hard as she can, trying not to think about how stupid that she must look, and tries to make the light brighter.  
It takes a minute, and then the sound gets louder, and she can just barely make out the bass line to a song that she almost remembers. She tries again, harder, and nothing changes. The third time, she overshoots, and the noise is so loud that she can’t hear anything else. She opens her eyes, and everything seems too bright, and the sound is pounding in her ears, some pop song that she remembers hearing on the radio when she was a kid. It’s pounding, and she can feel a headache cropping up, and she’s maybe panicking or on the verge of panicking, at least, when she loses the sound.  
She doesn’t know why, but all of a sudden she can’t hear it anymore. It’s gone as suddenly as it came. She sighs, and it sounds like the volume of a normal sigh, she thinks. She goes to stand up and her legs buckle a little bit, and she realizes that she’s panting, and she feels like she’s just run ten miles.  
Her head still hurts.  
The rest of the day, she isn’t sure how to focus, and her head feels tight and wrong and awful, and when the customer with the headphones checks out, Noa is a little bit relieved even though she can’t hear anything from them anymore.  
She goes home early, managing to sneak out. Since Will left, Marissa seems to have loosened the reigns a little bit. Noa knows that Eric left pretty recently, and she thinks that maybe Marissa is still reeling from his visit a little bit.  
She saw the exact same thing from her sister, every time her father came and went. She always knew he was going to leave, and that he wasn’t going to change, but every time that he came by she was holding out the hope from the last time.  
When Noa gets home, Will is there, earlier than usual. Édith’s shift isn’t over yet, but when Noa left the shop it was fairly quiet, with a steady stream of customers checking out at twenty minute or so intervals. It’s a boring job, true, but it’s kind of nice to have something go like clockwork.  
Will looks tired, and they’re curled up on the floor under a blanket.  
Noa comes in quietly and puts water in the kettle. She goes over and pokes Will, who curls up into a smaller ball than before.  
“Will?” She asks, tentatively. “Do you want some tea?”  
Will doesn’t like tea all that much, but Noa still feels obligated to ask. Will looks up and shakes their head, and Noa sees just how awful they look: they have bags under their eyes, and they’re paler than Noa has ever seen them, paler than she always teases Édith about being. They look sad, too.  
Will shakes their head. “No thanks.” They say, sounding miserable, and lay back down.  
Noa brews two cups anyway: strong black tea with milk and sugar for herself, and a smaller mug of mint tea for Will.  
When she brings it over, Will sits up, and takes it silently. Noa sits down next to them.  
“Why are you home so early?” she asks.  
“My professor sent me home. He thinks I’m getting sick.”  
Noa nods. “I think so too. No school or work for you tomorrow.”  
Will shakes their head. “I need to work.” They say, and take a sip of tea, making a face at the taste.  
Noa shakes her head. “No you don’t. Your health is more important.”  
Will shakes their head again, but Noa can see that they feel awful.  
“You need to sleep.”  
“Don’t wanna.”  
Noa sighs. “I’m going to put on a movie. You’re going to fall asleep in the middle.”  
“No’m not.” Will says, but it’s stifled slightly by their yawn in the middle of the sentence.  
She puts on one of the Studio Ghibli movies, knowing that Will likes them but never having seen them herself. This one, My Neighbor Totoro, is apparently the one with the cute animated character that she sees all over the place on shirts and backpacks and coffee mugs.  
Without meaning to, she gets engrossed in the plot, and when she looks back up halfway through the movie, Will is asleep and she’s let her tea go completely cold. She means to get up and reheat it, but the animation sucks her back in and she doesn’t manage to get back up until Édith walks in the door an hour or so later.  
She waves to Noa as she comes in the door, and goes to hang up her coat.  
“What were you watching?” She asks as Noa closes the laptop.  
“My Neighbor Totoro.” Noa responds quietly. “Will is sick,” she adds, by way of explanation, or maybe as an excuse that she got way too into a children’s movie.  
Édith grins, though. “I used to love that movie. The art is so beautiful.”  
Noa grins back.  
“Have you seen Kiki’s Delivery Service?” Édith asks. “That one was always my favorite. I loved the idea of being a witch.” She looks down ruefully.  
Noa’s already opening the laptop back up to try and pull up the movie. She finds it, and turns the screen to Édith.  
Wordlessly, Édith gets up, makes popcorn, grabs her blanket, and sits back down. They sit together, backs pressed against the wall, and dive back into the world of Kiki.  
Noa’s never seen movies like this before. She’s never liked subtitles, nor has she ever been all that into movies, but these ones are done so beautifully that she can turn off the part of her brain that makes her want to dislike it and focus on how pretty the backgrounds are.  
She loses the thread of the plot somewhere, and zones out, following the scenes as patters of color and shape rather that plot and sound, and thinks about her day.  
She knows her power, now, and she doesn’t know how to feel about it. She thought that when it came, it would be something spectacular, something that she could understand and work with and wouldn’t trade for anything in the world.  
She thought it would feel like something that’s undeniably her.  
This doesn’t feel like that. It’s kind of nice to be able to focus in on a sound and make it louder, but if all that she can do is eavesdrop, that doesn’t sound like it’s going to have much practical use.  
She left home for this. She moved across the world for this. She dropped out of school for this. Considering all of that, she just wishes that it didn’t feel quite so…ant-climactic.  
She just thought it would be a bit different.  
The witch on-screen leaves home, too, gets a job, too, and it feels like the same story on the surface.  
But the witch on-screen doesn’t seem quite so confused. She seems pretty happy. She finds a new family, a new home, a new boyfriend type person.  
Noa wants her life. She doesn’t want to be confused. She wants to be able to fly around on a broomstick and not have to think about any of the other type of things that come with being a witch, or having powers, or whatever the proper name is because nobody has managed to define that for her yet.  
Noa’s just kind of tired. Nothing is all that bad. She knows her power, now. She knows a little bit of how it works, although she isn’t quite sure how to control it.  
She’s got a place to live that’s a solid place, one that she can live with, and a job that pays the bills well enough that they don’t really have to worry.  
The movie finishes, and Édith and Will are both long asleep. Noa gets up, stretches, and makes herself a cup of noodles. She sits down on the kitchen counter to eat them, and pulls out her notebook.  
She’s kept these notebooks for as long as she can remember, and for just that long, she hasn’t let anybody call them a journal or a diary. They’re just her notebooks, full of seventh-grade angsty poems and sixth grade doodles of her favorite anime characters. This latest one, she started on the day that she was kicked out, and it’s almost full. She keeps writing smaller, because ending a journal feels like ending an era and she wants to hold on to this one for a little bit longer.  
It holds pages full of kitschy Paris postcards, mostly old photographs of couples in love in the twenties. It holds multiple drafts of her bookstore biography, the final page of which is ripped out and pasted on the wall next to her bed back in Paris. It has drawings of Édith from their slower shifts together and more self-portraits than she’s willing to admit or show to anybody.  
Mostly, though, it contains lists.  
To-do lists, lists of books she’s read, lists of books she’s read and actually enjoyed, lists of customers that came into the store neatly sorted into the type of customer they were, or the type of shoes they wore, or the color of their hair, or their age.  
Lists are tangible. They lay everything out on one sheet of paper, put things the way that they should be.  
Noa starts a new list on the bottom of a page halfway taken up by some doodles of the way that she thinks famous authors looked when they wrote.  
Things I Have To Worry About  
This is the kind of list that her mother used to ask her to make when her mouth was running a mile a minute about all the work that she had due and how awful the boys in her class were and how cold it was outside. You write down everything in your head, her mother used to explain, and then it’s not in your head anymore, so you can fill your head with ways to fix the problems.  
Noa used to stomp off to her room and try to think of anything to do other than make the list. In the end, though, she would make it, and it would help. So she starts listing things, slowly at first, and then with growing speed.  
1\. My power is stupid  
2\. My power is useless  
3\. I have to pay rent for this month  
4\. I have to pay utilities for this month  
5\. I still don’t know what happened to Will  
6\. This apartment isn’t big enough for the three of us  
7\. None of us can move out  
8\. I don’t get enough sleep  
9\. I’m not eating healthy  
10\. I want to go home  
11\. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I leave  
She stops, and looks at the last two that she’s written.  
I don’t know what I’m going to do when I leave. She repeats it in her head, again.  
This is still just her year. She’s still sixteen. She can still go home.  
She looks over to Édith and Will, sprawled on the mattresses that rest on the floor because they couldn’t afford bed frames, and thinks about it.  
This isn’t their year. Their years are long over.  
Noa still doesn’t feel like anything that she’s doing is real. It’s all going to end, and she’s going to go back home, and see her family, and go back to school, and catch up on her work, and hug all her friends and apologize for all the time that she spent ignoring their texts and calls.  
But Édith and Will don’t have somewhere to go home to. This is where they live. This is their real, actual lives that are happening and affecting what they’re going to do and where they’re going to go.  
Noa figured at the start that when she was done she could just put her year behind her and move on, get back to routine, and maybe have this cool useful power that would make her life just a little bit easier. She doesn’t see how she can put all of this behind her, all of the things that she’s seen and done, and the people that she’s met.  
Édith left her home country to move to America with Noa. She wouldn’t have left, otherwise. That’s a crazy amount of trust that she’s placed in Noa and that she’s placed in herself that they had the capability to find somewhere to work and live and some way to survive.  
Noa didn’t even really have that trust in herself. She doesn’t know what to do with the knowledge that somebody else has it in her.  
The rent, the utilities, those feel like small issues, because those she knows how to handle. Those they can do as a group.  
She just can’t get the thought out of her mind that the group isn’t always going to be like it is now. And she knows full well how naïve that sounds, even in her own head, because no human relationship can or will ever stay the same for all eternity. It’s just that she falls into routine so quickly, and has found herself falling into this one so easily, and she wants it to stay around for as long as possible.  
Except that she doesn’t, completely. She still wants to go home. She just doesn’t know how to reconcile being home with not being here.  
She looks at the rest of her list, trying to think of ways to fix them.  
The first two are what her mother would call issues in perception, as most issues are. All you have to do is change the way that you see things and the things will get better on their own. That’s the point of the list, to take the things away from the mental space of being an issue and forcing them into the mental space of just being.  
Noa tries her best to be an optimist. These things will just take time. She can practice, find new ways, be able to control it better.  
Her abuela would have chided her, reminded her that nothing is useless. Everything has a second life, one more way to be used, one more day before it’s thrown away.  
Her abuela never throws anything away.  
She’s learned that, too, learned the value of a plastic bag full of plastic bags, knows that the ten cents you save at the grocery store mean ten cents less of rent to pay, learned that any container that food comes in can be washed and re-used, that adding water to your dish soap might make it less effective, but it means that you have another week’s worth of dish soap.  
She used to make fun of her abuela for scrimping every penny, used to tease that if she found change in the couch cushions she would put it in the bank. Her abuela would ignore it, would ask, “Why shouldn’t I? A penny more is still a penny more.”  
Maybe powers are the same way. Maybe experiences are the same way. The more you collect, the more that you have to draw on later just in case you might need it.  
So her power is useless. So she’ll practice. So she’ll see if she can figure out uses.  
Maybe nothing is useless. She certainly hopes not.  
Noa looks back down at the last few items on her list.  
They do need a bigger apartment. She takes a moment to wish, before laughing at herself, and goes to decide whose bed she wants to climb into, and whether it might not just be easier to sleep on the floor.  
A new apartment. We should start with a new bed, she thinks, and climbs in with Will, resigning herself to waking up in a tangle of limbs and probably with drool in her hair. Mentally, she makes yet another list.  
Things I Need To Make Happen  
1\. Obtaining another bed  
This one seems significantly more manageable. She can always think over solutions for every item on her other list tomorrow morning.

Part 4: Homecoming

It’s a cliché to say that days ran into weeks ran into months, but that does tend to be how time goes. It didn’t run fast, but it didn’t run slow, either, and when the girls looked back, it seemed too short and too long at the same time.  
The summer was the coldest that Noa and Édith had ever seen, and Will laughed at them when they didn’t know how to deal with the fact that they were bundling up throughout July.  
They made their way through the summer. Marissa didn’t know quite how to deal with Will moving out, and treated them with frosty courtesy, until one day she apparently couldn’t anymore, and told Will that they either had to move back home and be her daughter, or be out of her life completely.  
The ultimatum was somewhat out of the blue, and after a sleepless night in which the trio holed out in their apartment, going round in circles with the same intense discussions, Will decided on the latter option.  
They also discovered that getting a job was harder if your mother wasn’t the person running the business.  
It’s also harder to get away with breaking the rules.  
So they managed to get a job waitressing at odd hours and keep going with school. When the summer hit, they hardly slept, working entirely too many hours a day. Noa and Édith didn’t think it was healthy. Then again, Noa and Édith worked too many hours, too.  
They went to parties that Will got invited to and Noa wasn’t great at socializing with people that she didn’t know already and Édith drank too much and forgot half of her English when she was drinking and it tended to be a mess every time. Every time, Will would threaten to never let them leave the apartment again, and every time, they would go along and repeat the process all over again. It worked for them.  
Édith learned to cook something more than her potions and occasionally eggs or toast under Noa’s watchful eye. She tried to teach Will, too, but after the third time that they knocked a pot of soup off the stove or spilled an entire bag of rice on the ground, Noa decided that maybe it was better just to leave well enough alone.  
Noa spent a month asking everybody that she knew about how they developed their powers.  
A girl who could actually fly on a broomstick but thought it was totally useless told her that she learned the best way by, essentially, “falling on my ass a lot. Like, a lot a lot.” The girl said that this applied to all walks of life, and when Noa looked at her feet she was levitating slightly. Noa thought it was maybe a good idea to back away a bit, and moved rapidly across the room.  
A boy who was shorter than Noa, although she hadn’t previously thought that was possible, shook his hair out of his eyes and took tiny rapid sips from his drink in between telling her all about how he learned to shape his own body by pulling and stretching, how it took so much practice to be able to extend that to somebody else, how he had looked at it almost like homework or learning an instrument, like something that he had to do for a set amount of time every day in order to manage properly. He asked for her number, too.  
She met a girl with pink hair who cracked her gum while she talked and had crooked teeth. The girl warned her that people will abuse their powers, that there are just as many creeps in this community as there are in any other one. She told horror stories, stories about people who learned to brew lust for girl’s drinks, stories about people who could force you to do things that you didn’t want to with a touch, stories about people who thought it was funny to use their powers on the unsuspecting, “just to practice.”  
The girl taught her charms to protect against unwanted magic, and gave her a pendant to dip into her drinks at parties.  
“Don’t be stupid.” The girl warned, and Noa had nodded mutely.  
It was hard to hear, but she heard it, and she never left the house without her pendant.  
They went to meetings, all together, sometimes sneaking out in the dead of night as if their parents were after them, going to meet with older witches, ones who taught them charms to cook faster, or make fire, or how to see what people’s futures were.  
All three of them had been holding out some sort of hope that seeing the future was real, but it wasn’t quite what they had hoped.  
It was more of seeing somebody’s aura, doing charms to gain an understanding of them so you could make a guess at what they were going to do next. Will and Noa dropped the idea of learning this almost immediately, but Édith was fascinated by it, and sometimes spent time with the lady who taught it, just the two of them, pouring over some ancient notes on how to tell fortunes better.  
Will’s favorite spell was the one that allowed them to find missing objects. Noa liked learning household ones, and she kept a careful list, wondering which ones her family knew and which ones she could take home to them.  
Her mother’s letter had said that all magic came with some sort of a price, but the women taught Noa that you could choose the price you paid. She always brought some trinkets with her, a book that she had read and loved, some home made cookies, something that could be taken from her in exchange for what she wanted to do.  
She learned that the more weight something carried to you, the more magic it would provide. Will thought it was kind of annoying that you had to give something up in order to get something back. Édith liked the balance aspect of it all. She tried in vain to convince Will that it was good, that it made you think about what you did.  
Will always just threw whatever was closest at her and said that thinking was for losers.  
Noa forced herself to work with her power. She fought it, trained it, sat by the window for hours and tried to hear the conversation going on in the cars driving by. Sometimes she could only catch a snatch of the song that they were listening to. Sometimes she could follow it until they drove out of sight.  
She learned to make things quieter, not just louder, and found herself much more comfortable in crowded spaces, when she crowd seemed to just speak at a whisper instead of a shout, although it was disconcerting at first.  
She didn’t tell Édith and Will about what she was doing.  
Édith and Will started to worry a lot, started to talk to each other about the fact that hey maybe Noa has been a bit out of it do you think that she’s okay do you think that we can do anything?  
The two of them, together, confronted her at the end of the summer, when it felt like the time had come, the night before Will had to go back to school.  
Noa was confused. She didn’t have any idea why they were so worried, thought that maybe they had come to tell her that somebody died or she had lost her job or something equally awful.  
She told them that she had just been trying to understand her power better, and took them over to the window. She put a hand on Will’s shoulder and one on Édith’s arm, hoping that maybe it would extend a bit and she would be able to show them what she’d been working towards this whole time.  
She focused as hard as she could, waited for a car to drive by, and drove her power out as far as it would go, hoping that they could hear the song as the car passed by.  
It worked.  
Édith jumped away, not entirely sure what had just happened, having been told by Noa to be quiet, watching her screw up her face, and then suddenly hearing a burst of noise. Will was proud of her.  
They stopped worrying.  
The landlord raised the rent and they all worked a little harder, spent a little bit less time at parties and a little bit more working the Friday night shifts, as if anybody came to a bookstore on a Friday night.  
And so time passed faster than they expected and faster than they meant it to go, and Noa forgot to worry about her list, and got a new journal, and then another one because she filled up the last one so fast.  
So all of a sudden it’s October, and neither Noa nor Édith realize it, until Will comes home from school one day, and Noa is making dinner, and Édith is browsing the internet, and Will bounces in, throws their stuff on the ground like Noa is always telling them not to, and asks what might be the most important question of the century.  
“So what are you guys going as for Halloween?”

Chapter One: Édith  
Halloween was never on Édith’s radar growing up. It’s really more of a big deal in America, no matter how many grocery stores try to use it as an excuse to sell pumpkins that nobody ever buys anyway.  
In America, though, it feels completely different. In the middle of October, Marissa comes up to her while she’s straightening up the shelves and practically dumps a box of decorations at her feet.  
“Do the window display.”  
She walks off with no further instruction, leaving Édith to pick up the box and ask Noa what the hell America thinks it’s doing, seeing as they’re in California, hardly a place known for it’s fall foliage.  
She does as she’s told, though, and the longer that the month goes, the more she sees flyers going up for parties, stores putting up displays of their costumes and recipes and pumpkins to carve, and she kind of likes it. It feels festive.  
Will, of course, is incredibly enthusiastic. When they discover that Édith has never had what they call “a real Halloween,” they take it upon themselves to show her all of the best traditions, including movies, music, and costumes.  
Édith goes along with this enthusiastically enough, although she doesn’t quite understand the point of buying expensive costumes that you can only wear once. She does appreciate the abundance of candy on sale, though, and ends up really liking candy corn, even though both Will and Noa insist that it tastes like wax and that her taste buds must be broken.  
Noa doesn’t seem too happy about it, though. From the minute that Will mention Halloween, she starts to melt a little bit, but whenever Édith tries to figure it out, Noa pushes her away. She’s kind of at a loss for how to deal with it, but when she asks Will about it, they haven’t even noticed.  
Then again, Will tends to be incredibly oblivious. Édith decides to leave it alone for once, and if she sometimes makes Noa coffee with a hint of cheerfulness, it can’t hurt. On the night itself, Will tries to convince them to go to a party, and Noa refuses to come along.  
She says that she’s staying in and won’t budge an inch off of her mattress. In the end, Édith and Will shrug and leave her at home.  
Will wants to go back, but Édith insists. After all of this build up, she kind of wants to see the night itself.  
They don’t actually have to walk to the party, this time, and Édith is glad that Kevin can pick them up because she’s already regretting her decision to wear heels. Rather than picking a costume from one of the pop-up Halloween stores that Will likes to “just pop in to” and leave with an armful of decorations or a plastic severed limb or yet another bag of kitschy candy, she bought an old-fashioned dress from goodwill and put on some eyeliner and is planning to say that she’s a girl from the fifties if anybody bothers to ask.  
They arrive at a house somewhere in the city, and have to scream “TRICK OR TREAT” in order for the host to let them in.  
The host turns out to be Nick, who is resplendent in zombie makeup and grins when he opens the door, sleazing on Will, Édith, and Kevin in turn.  
Kevin rolls his eyes, Will hits him, and Édith pretends to be scandalized because it seems like a appropriate response for the costume.  
Nick’s house is absolutely beautiful, and Édith kind of hates him for it, especially when she mentally compares it to her apartment, so she abandons Will and makes her way to the kitchen, and hopefully alcohol, thinking that maybe this stupid expensive house will have stupidly expensive liquor to go along with it.  
She gets her drink, and walks around a bit, ignoring the people dancing to the music played by some kid who clearly harbors dreams of being a DJ, although he hasn’t quite managed to gain the ability to become one yet. She runs her hands over the furniture and touches the paintings on the wall, lightly enough that she won’t injure them. She just wants to soak the place in.  
It’s not often that she finds herself thinking about France, or about where she grew up. She didn’t really manage to keep in touch with her brother or her mother, but she’s pretty okay with it. Sometimes she looks at her brother’s Facebook page just to see what he’s doing, but beyond that, her last life is pretty far out of mind.  
This house, though, has the same feeling, and she wonders if Nick would know what she meant. She’s never tried to explain it to Noa, the feeling that your own home is off limits for you to touch, too full of nice things for you to belong in it.  
At the same time, it does feel good to be surrounded by nice things.  
She goes upstairs, telling people that she’s looking for a bathroom, but really meaning to poke around some of the other rooms. She walks into a random door, to find a group of people sitting on couches and on the floor, faces turned in rapt attention to a large screen with a projector set up, playing a movie that she vaguely remembers watching with Will as part of her Halloween education.  
About half of the faces in the room turn to her, and somebody motions for her to sit down. Without thinking, she finds a bit of empty space near the door, thinking to only stay for a few minutes.  
She doesn’t leave for the rest of the night. Her drink is on the floor, forgotten, as she focuses in on the movie. She isn’t sure that it’s good, really, but it’s something to think about other than how much she wishes that she doesn’t have to be where she is, or the music pounding through the floor, or how much she would normally be drinking right now in order to avoid thinking.  
The longer she stays, the more the images on screen feel like they’re just blurring together into one long, senseless montage of time spent.  
It’s nice to have a quiet night in, even if that’s what she does every other night.  
Somehow, it’s different when the night in isn’t actually in her house.  
Somewhere around three in the morning, if she had to guess the time, she found herself drifting off, and let it happen. She knew that she should be getting home, that she should be worrying about working tomorrow or what Noa was going to say when she gets home or where Will is.  
She closes her eyes and goes to sleep, with the last thing she sees on-screen being a teenage girl screaming as the camera zoomed in closer.  
She has better dreams than she’s ever had, and when she wakes up she kind of wishes that she remembered them, but she’s just left with the fleeting impression of something dark blue.  
There are forty cricks in her neck and fifty more in her back, and as she forces herself to get up and stretch, she can feel every one of them. There’s a crack of light coming in from the curtains, and she doesn’t recognize any of the people asleep around her. She checks her phone, and isn’t surprised to see that she’s the first one awake. It’s not even 10 am yet.  
Maybe waking up the same time every day really has put her on a schedule. Noa never needs an alarm, and Édith always wondered why. She shrugs, guessing that it’s just her habit that lets her get up at the same time every day regardless of whether or not she’s forced to.  
Her lock screen shows the missed messages: a couple from a very drunk Will informing her that they were heading home, and a more terse one from Noa asking where she was, both sent within 15 minutes of each other. Édith dismisses the notifications and eases the door open, trying to slip out without having to see anyone. She runs right into Nick, who looks unfairly awake and shockingly lacking a hangover. She puts a finger over her lips.  
“Shh. They’re all still sleeping.”  
He opens the door to poke his head in the room and nods.  
“I’m gonna have to kick them out in a couple hours.”  
She grins. “Good luck.”  
He grins back. “Wanna go get breakfast? I don’t feel like evicting everyone from the kitchen to cook.”  
Édith understood the first half of the question well enough to say yes, and they started walking.  
“You’re French, right?”  
She stares at him for a second. Is he making a joke or is he just stupid?  
He cracks up. “I’m not quite that dumb.”  
Thank god.  
“You’ll love this place. Just like home.”  
He brings her to this little café that advertises authentic French crepes on the sign. Édith doesn’t buy it, because when they first got here and she was homesick, she and Noa went out to a restaurant that made the same claim, and when they looked at the Americanized menu they fell over themselves laughing. It wasn’t funny, not really, but it was better than admitting how much they wanted to go back.  
Édith doesn’t want to go back anymore, but she does want some French food that’s actually French, so when she looks at the menu she’s disappointed if not surprised to just see the typical American breakfast fare, just with thinner pancakes.  
Still, when the food arrives it’s plentiful and tasty and absolutely worth the price of entry, especially when Nick pays and doesn’t talk too much and drives her home, thanking her for coming in awful French.  
She laughs at him.  
“I guess Rosetta Stone lied to me about my accent proficiency.” He says, shaking his head, and she laughs at that too.  
He drives off, and she’s left on the curb below her apartment building, gearing up to face a worried Noa and probably an irritated Will, as a worried Noa makes for a manic Noa, and Will prefers to be the only manic energy in any given situation.  
She walks the stairs up, slowly, and lets herself in to find both of them still asleep, Noa sitting up in bed propped against a wall with her laptop in front of her, Will sprawled across the other bed, taking up far more space than anyone would think possible when they first saw them.  
Édith pulls her heels off as quietly as possible, almost falling on her face as she attempts to balance on one leg. She changes into sweats and takes her makeup off, knowing that she and Noa have to go into work for the afternoon. Will has the rest of the day to sleep it off.  
She makes a cup of hot, sweet tea, and goes to shake Noa awake. She wakes up and stretches, and smiles when she sees Édith, who hands her the mug. She smiles even wider for a second, before it falls off her face just as suddenly.  
“Why didn’t you come home last night?” She hisses at Édith. Édith winces, having known this was coming, but still not feeling prepared for it.  
She sighs. “I’m sorry.”  
Noa clearly wasn’t expecting an apology right off the bat. The way this goes is that she screams at Édith out of worry, Édith argues back, due to irritation over being yelled at, they both get angry, stop talking for three hours, and then go to apologize within six minutes of each other. Will timed it once, just to prove how much they went like clockwork.  
This had just resulted in both of them yelling at Will.  
“I started watching a movie and then I just fell asleep.”  
Noa’s eyebrows raise high enough to be in danger of falling off her face entirely. She nods slowly, and pulls her sleeves down over her hands.  
“Make me breakfast and all will be forgiven.”  
Édith grins, knowing that means that she’s been forgiven already. She pulls out a pan and a bowl, starting to beat eggs for one of the only dishes that she can reliably make: ironically enough, French toast.

Chapter 2: Noa  
Noa likes Halloween quite a bit, if she’s being honest with herself. It was just an easy excuse to stay in, to pretend that she wasn’t interested, although whether or not Will and Édith believed her, she doesn’t know, although she has her doubts.  
She just didn’t know how to react when Will reminded them that it was going to be Halloween sooner than anyone was aware of.  
Normally, she started daydreaming about her costume in August, nursing intricate fantasies of how dramatic and complicated and wonderful it would be this year, then realized that she didn’t have money to spend to buy a costume, nor was she particularly interested in paying for parts of it, and her parents weren’t about to pay for it either.  
Dia de los santos is the day after Halloween, anyway. Even though Wisconsin is possibly the worst place to celebrate it, Halloween is always meant to be the day of preparation. Halloween at her house was a lot of baking, a lot of cleaning, a lot of helping her tío dig through the attic in order to find the one photo of the one relative that just had to go on the altar this year, because they forgot it last year, except that they didn’t forget it last year, they had to look then too.  
So she’s missing her family a bit, but she thought that it would be cool to have a Halloween where she didn’t have to do anything but dress up and go to a party.  
Except that Halloween is the day before November.  
Noa learned the months of the year in kindergarten. She could sing you six different songs enumerating what they are and how many days they have and probably the holidays in each one.  
She still manages every year to forget that the next one is coming until it’s almost here.  
November used to be her favorite month, for its proximity to Christmas and for the time off at thanksgiving, but the most important part is always her birthday. She’s never not wanted her birthday to come.  
This year, she thinks, it can stay as far away from me as it’s possibly capable of.  
It’s been nearly a year since she had to leave, nearly a year since the night that she slept in the greyhound station, nearly a year since she cried in that coffee shop reading the letter for the first time.  
She doesn’t want the year to end. She hasn’t thought about it ending in months. She hasn’t thought about the coffee shop since before then. She still has the letter, stained and wrinkled and folded and unfolded so many times that the creases refuse to come out and the writing that they pass through is illegible.  
She pulls it out as soon as Will and Édith have left, and rereads the last paragraph. 

When you come home, I will show you how to grow herbs. When you come home, I will hold on to you while you tell me stories of the people you met. When you come home, I will love you enough for all the days soon when you will feel as if I do not.

Come home soon, mija.  
Mami.

For her mother, it isn’t a question of if. It’s a question of when, and the answer is as soon as possible. When Noa left, that was the answer for her, too. Somewhere along the line it changed. Somewhere between bickering with Édith and flying back across the Atlantic to another place that she’d never been and sleeping on couches and floors and mattresses shoved into the corners that she could never free of dust, she found a home here.  
And just like in Paris, she doesn’t know how to go, just that she’s supposed to. But then, there was something waiting for her somewhere in herself, something that gave her the incentive. She didn’t want to disappoint her family. She didn’t want to come home empty handed.  
Then, she didn’t have a place to come home to. She didn’t sink in as much in Paris, but here the apartment is hers and the job is hers and she’s keeping it under her own merit, with no obligation on anyone else’s part. There isn’t any question of what will happen if she goes back to live with her family. They’ll welcome her back. She’ll get the chance to be a teenager again, the chance that she hasn’t really had in the past few months. She won’t have to worry about rent or bills or whether or not there’s food in the house to make dinner because ordering out isn’t in the budget but neither is more groceries.  
There’s no Édith in Wisconsin. There’s no Will at her old school, no Kevin to commiserate about being the mom friend, no Nick to make her blush every ten seconds, no Marissa to avoid at work, no work to be done other than her school work.  
That doesn’t sound appealing.  
She wants to see her family, yes, but she doesn’t want to give up the family that she’s found by herself, either.  
Noa has never found herself wishing that she had less friends before. Then again, she’s never had friends that mean this much.  
A friend was just somebody that you met in math class, talked to on the bus, went to movies with when they didn’t have piano lessons, or suffered through church with once a week and didn’t see any other time.  
A friend was somebody who you hugged at the end of the year, signed their yearbook, and then didn’t say a word to them until September, unless you ran into them in the grocery store. If they move away, they’ve dropped off of the face of the earth, but you still like their instagram posts when you catch them.  
She never used to feel lonely, but now at the thought of leaving, she’s never felt more alone.  
She tries again to smooth out the wrinkles in the letter. Her mother wants her to come home.  
Family was always a forever type of thing. Friends, you can leave behind.  
Noa resolutely does not think about how Édith and Will have both left their families. She tries her best to ignore her brain sending her nasty reminders that they won’t get along without her, that they’ll go to parties and not worry about the other one getting home safe.  
She checks her phone, hoping maybe one of them is coming home early so they can talk, hoping that one of them has magically sensed her conflict and is coming home to help her talk through the choice that she has to make, just like she did with Will.  
Nobody comes back.  
She tries her best not to feel abandoned, reminding herself that she chose not to go out, that she chose to push them away. It’s hardly their fault if they don’t automatically know to smother her with love so she knows that she should stay.  
She tells herself that they don’t want her here anyway, that it’s no big deal to leave, and then tries to drown her thoughts out by watching a movie.  
She puts on some French movie about gang violence that Édith has sworn up and down is beautiful, and forces herself to bring the sound up to a nice, loud, impossible to focus on anything else kind of volume.  
It works pretty well, and when she looks up from the credits, there’s still nobody home. She texts Will and Édith, with considerably less worry than she normally tends to have, and puts on another movie. This one is mindless, even louder than the last, full of obnoxious dance numbers and an actor that she’s never understood the appeal of. She isn’t aware of falling asleep.  
The next morning, she blinks and is immediately shocked by how bright it is before realizing that she must have been asleep. She looks up, stretching her back, and Édith is right there, staring at her, looking worried in the same way that she always does when she thinks that Noa is going to yell at her.  
She decided to meet the expectations. Maybe leaving will be easier if she makes them hate her first.  
“Why didn’t you come home last night?” she glares, and glances over at Will, still asleep, sprawled over the mattress like they had a fight with it and got knocked out halfway through.  
Édith apologizes and hands her a mug of tea. Noa is taken aback. She was expecting a fight, or at least to be snapped at. Édith has never handled hangovers very gracefully, but today she seems awake and cheerful and remorseful, a bizarre combination on her part.  
She says that she was just watching a movie.  
Noa has her doubts, but she decides to just settle in and allow breakfast to be made for her. Sometimes it’s just nice to have some leverage.  
It’s only the first of November. She has over a week to make a choice.  
She pushes the thoughts of last night back down like she’s been doing all summer, and watches Édith crack eggs, teasing every time that she drops shell in the bowl. All it does is make her drop more shells.  
They laugh too loud, and manage to wake up Will, who comes into the kitchen still sleepy and takes two advil and devours a piece of the French toast before they say anything.  
“How was your night?” Édith asks. Noa thinks she sounds a bit smug, as if she isn’t in the same situation every week but this one. Will rolls their eyes.  
“The same as always. You disappeared, dude, what the fuck?” They shove another bite of toast in their mouth. “Do we have any coffee?”  
Noa brews a pot and tunes out as Édith repeats exactly what she told Noa: she just got caught up watching movies in some back room, or something. Noa’s not sure that she buys this story. Édith hasn’t been drinking, clearly, but Noa can’t think of a reason that movies would hold her attention enough to make her miss out on a party, nor does that justify why she’s so happy and calm this morning.  
Édith isn’t a morning person. She’s best, honestly, in the mid to late afternoon range, when she’s not quite tired yet, but she’s fully awake.  
A tired Édith is a nightmare to be around.  
Will is best in the evenings. They somehow manage to perk up right around 7 pm, or whenever they’ve had caffeine.  
Will has a manic energy that Noa won’t really miss, if she leaves, but in the evenings when she doesn’t have anything to do, she slows down a bit, and isn’t better, but is maybe easier to spend time around.  
Significantly more relaxing, anyway.  
If she leaves.  
She keeps coming back to it, turning the statement over in her head when she’s eating breakfast, when she’s walking to work, when she’s in a conversation that she really shouldn’t drop out of so randomly because some people really do think that it’s rude.  
She keeps tripping over the if. The if that makes it really hard for her to get to the end of the sentence without mentally turning it into a question.  
Noa likes tangible things.  
She likes to have worries that she can put down on a list, likes to see the pros and the cons and count them up so that whatever she does has a justification.  
She’s sitting in work. It’s November 3rd and she opens to a new page.

Leaving San Francisco: Pros and Cons  
She needs a title. She debates what it should be before jotting it down. Titles have to be neutral in order to be good. This one doesn’t encompass the enormity of this choice. She could call it going home or she could call it leaving my friends behind or something equally biased but she hates guilt trips enough when they’re done to others, much less when she does them to herself.  
New section:  
Pros:  
• Get to see my family  
• Don’t have to worry about bills  
• Don’t have to see Marissa anymore  
• Don’t have to work anymore  
• I could go back to school  
She stops writing. The I in that last sentence was a mistake. She can’t be objective unless it’s impersonal. She crosses it out, and moves on to the cons.  
Cons:  
• Would have to leave Édith  
• Would have to leave Will  
• Would have to go back to school  
• Would have to spend time with whole family  
• Would have to see my dad  
She stops writing again, and examines her points over again. Every pro is also a con, every point is negating itself. It’s not getting any easier.  
I can always keep in touch with the two of them.  
Yeah, well you could keep in touch with your family, too.  
I could go back to school.  
You never liked school in the first place. Besides, what you’re learning now has more real-world applications than anything they could teach you in high school.  
I could stop working at the bookstore.  
You could get a new job here, too. Nothing is keeping you at the bookstore but yourself.  
The rules say to go back home.  
This one, she can’t think of a rebuttal for. The rules that her mom wrote out, those have been what she keeps coming back to this whole time. Every time that she’s been unsure, she’s gone back to the letter, gone back to find out what she needed to do, how she could make it through.  
She’s made it through this far. She’s almost at the other side.  
The apartment only has two beds. They can manage the rent with two people. School can’t possibly be that bad.  
Maybe I can come back to visit.  
She thinks back to Paris, and her plan for leaving there, too. She never got the chance to sneak out of anywhere.  
She could do it here.  
If I leave.  
If.  
Chapter 3: Édith  
Noa still seems a bit off to Édith.  
She’s quieter than she usually is, which, considering Noa, is somewhat difficult to notice. Édith doesn’t know whether or not to confront her about it, and Will seems to be off in their own world somewhere, so Édith takes the easiest route that she knows and chooses to ignore it.  
Nick invites her to hang out with him the next morning before work, and the afternoon after.  
Édith doesn’t know what to do with this attention. She’s used to having a few close friends and an employer and maybe a grocery store clerk who says hi to her sometimes as the most important people in her life.  
Nick, whatever he wants to be to her, is confusing.  
He clearly wants to be something.  
She never says no to spending time with him, though, and Will teases her about it.  
She gets home from work on Sunday, and Will is sitting cross-legged on the bed, eating chips and dropping crumbs everywhere.  
They grin when Édith walks in.  
“How was your morning?” They ask far too innocently for it to be an innocent question.  
“Fine, yours?” Édith doesn’t take the bait.  
Will wiggles their eyebrows obnoxiously. “I heard you went out with Nick.”  
“Who told you that?”  
“Nick did.”  
Édith’s eyes widen. There’s no way. She thought he was less of an asshole than this. Will laughs.  
“Nah, Kevin told me ages ago that Nick wanted to go out with you and you weren’t at breakfast this morning so Noa and I just kind of figured that the two of you were together.”  
Édith can feel herself blushing. She hadn’t intended for them to know, wanting to figure it out for herself before she explained it to her friends.  
“Do you really think it’s a good idea?”  
Édith narrows her eyes at Will. “And why wouldn’t it be?”  
Will plows on with what they have to say. “Because Kevin saw something about it and it really worried him and he doesn’t know quite how to talk to you about it but I bet you anything that he thinks it’s all going to end in tears and he usually doesn’t talk to me about anything like this so I bet you that it’s super important so maybe you shouldn’t get into this relationship because there’s no way it’s going to turn out good unless something drastic changes and…” they stop for air, and Édith jumps in, having struggled to follow any of what just came out of their mouth.  
“Can you repeat that? Slower?”  
Will goes through the same spiel, almost word for word. Édith still can’t really follow it, but she’s loath to ask what she might be missing.  
It’s a few minutes later when it clicks.  
“What do you mean, Kevin saw something?”  
Will looks up, shocked, and immediately covers their face with their hands. Édith just stares at them, utterly lost.  
“Can you forget that I ever said anything?” They ask. “Do whatever you want. It’s not my life. I’m really really sorry for bothering you.” They pack up their chips, gather the crumbs off of the bed, which Édith has never seen them do without a fight, put the bag away, grab their coat, and practically sprint out of the house.  
What did they mean, he saw something?  
Since Will so clearly doesn’t want to tell her anything, Édith chalks it down to her list of unsolved mysteries, and ignores it.  
If neither of her friends want to tell her anything about what’s going on, that’s their problem.  
This is the month that she expects winter to start, but it feels like fall and summer have switched places here. The consistent sun is unexpected, and she still doesn’t feel quite right with her winter coat packed away in storage when she should just be pulling it out.  
Noa put a calendar up on the wall when they first moved in, although it’s still on August. Édith gets up and changes it to November. She still feels a bit shaken, like something is off, even though she can’t put her finger on it. Her phone buzzes.  
When she pulls it out to check it, it’s another text from Nick. She pauses before answering, feeling uncomfortable. She ignores what he just sent her, and texts him  
What’s kevin’s power?  
He takes a long time to respond, alternately typing and stopping like he has no idea what to say. When the message finally sends, it doesn’t tell her much.  
Not my place to tell you  
You could ask him?  
Of course he’s protecting his friend. She wants to be angry, because it doesn’t help her, but she’s pretty glad that he’s worth trusting.  
And holy shit, she didn’t want to be this girl, the one who analyzed every message to see whether a guy was worth trusting or not and thinks that all of her friends are hiding some dark secret and maybe none of what she’s worried about is rooted in reality in any way shape or form.  
She kind of feels like her mind is bouncing off the walls. She doesn’t know how to deal with that, other than to ignore it and move on.  
She’s been doing an awful lot of that lately. She doesn’t think it’s healthy, not really, but as long as it keeps her from being kept up at night, it works.  
She shakes her head at herself and texts Nick back.  
Fair enough.  
She invites him to have dinner with them tonight, just for good measure.  
When Noa comes home from closing the store and Will returns from wherever they went off to in order to avoid being questioned, Édith is in the kitchen with Nick, who has turned out to be a surprisingly decent chef. He’s probably better than Édith, but she’s not planning on admitting that to him ever. Instead, she’s laughing at the fact that he managed to get egg in his hair when he cracked one and it went everywhere, when the other two come home and are caught completely off guard.  
Will punches him in the arm and asks what the fuck he’s doing here. Noa looks happy enough to see him, and grins when he asks if she still likes the way that her hair looks and asks where she was at his Halloween party.  
Her face falls a little bit at the second part, though, and she says she’s getting over a cold and didn’t want to infect anyone and still doesn’t, and goes to sit by the window. Will shrugs and asks if she can help with cooking, then tells a long-winded story about the first time that she ever saw Nick cook, with a lot of interruptions from Nick about how she’s telling it wrong and he doesn’t remember it quite like that. Édith feels a little bit protective, almost, and wishes that she had more stories to tell about time that she spent with him.  
They all sit together to eat the final product, an unfortunately crunchy plate of fried rice that’s just good enough to be worth eating but not good enough to want a second helping of.  
Despite everything that Édith needs to say later, the stuff that she’s shoved down so deep it’s going to be a fight to pull it back out to fight over it, she feels in control. She feels good. She feels like it’s all working pretty well.  
Nick goes home early, but he kisses her for the first time on the elevator ride when she walks him down to the lobby, and she can’t stop smiling the whole ride back up.  
Will even offers her one of the beds for the night.

Chapter 4: Noa  
It’s November 8th.  
Noa turns that over in her head, again. It’s November 8th, although it’s getting pretty late, and the later it gets in the day the closer it is to the 9th and the 9th is the day before her birthday and she doesn’t know how to deal with that.  
She’s staring at the lock screen on her phone, turning it back on every time that it goes off, watching the minutes tick by, and it’s still November 8th, and no matter how hard she wills the numbers to not go in the direction that they’re going, it’s almost November 9th.  
Last Sunday she made her choice. It seemed like the right choice, then. Édith came home with her boyfriend, or whoever Nick is to her today, even though she won’t explain it to anybody, and they made dinner together, and the food was awful but they were proud of it, and when she came home from walking him out she couldn’t stop touching her lips.  
So Édith was going to be okay with out her. And Will was always going to be okay, because that’s how Will works.  
And she can come back to visit. And on Sunday all of this seemed reasonable.  
It’s a Thursday, and it’s close to midnight, and Noa’s phone has finally died but she doesn’t bother to get up and charge it.  
So she can leave and they’ll be fine. This is the right choice to make.  
That’s what she keeps telling herself.  
The next day, she didn’t expect herself to be able to focus during work, but she hardly thinks the whole day, doing the best job that she possibly can, as if the best time to earn Marissa’s approval is on the last day that she works there. When Édith comes over to her while she’s eating lunch and asks if she wants to go to Nick’s party of the week, she says no.  
It’s November 9th and she spends the rest of her lunch break buying a bus ticket online, knowing that the trip will take a couple days, knowing that it’ll be miserable and involve transfers and more driving than she’s ever had to sit through in her life. She spends the afternoon downloading movies onto her laptop, hoping that she can watch them on the way without getting nauseous.  
That night, Édith has to help close, so Noa runs home, praying that Will won’t be there, that she wont have to explain herself to anybody before she goes.  
She plays music on her phone while she packs, practicing boosting the sound until she can’t hear anything else, until all that she can focus on is the music in her ears and the clothes in her hands, folding them as rapidly as she can before shoving them in her suitcase. She takes a shower, the last one that she knows she can have for the next few days. She leaves her books behind. Maybe Édith and Will can ship them too her, later. She doesn’t eat dinner, too full of nervous energy to be able to keep anything down.  
She packs her backpack with all the snacks in the cupboard and her laptop and all her chargers and hopes that she hasn’t missed anything. Before leaving, she looks around one last time, brews a cup of tea, and walks away, leaving her key on the table, pretending that her hand isn’t shaking just because it’s wrapped around her travel mug.  
The guy at the bus station scans the ticket that she’s pulled up on her phone and shoves her bag roughly into the storage under the bus. He turns out to be the driver, and looks absolutely exhausted as he enumerates the rules, knowing that there is little to know chance that they will be followed. The kid whose mother has also brought a crying baby on board runs shrieking down the aisle as the bus pulls out of the station, and Noa has never been more thankful for her powers as she settles in to watch the first movie and the baby’s noise fades into the background.  
The movie is one that she saw on some top ten list, and it’s awful, but she finishes it even though it makes her feel mildly nauseous. She looks out the window. This leg of the journey has ten or so more hours to go. At least it’s overnight, she thinks, as she watches it get darker outside. They’re driving up the coast, through the whole of the west coast, and she watches the towns go by as they pass through. She falls asleep somewhere around the third rest stop, with a new woman sitting next to her. She counts herself lucky that the woman doesn’t try to make conversation beyond a simple hello. Noa waves back and swallows the sudden lump in her throat.  
She focuses on the scenery that they pass, and then counts streetlights on the highway until she falls asleep, late at night, somewhere near the border of Oregon. She wakes up around 7 am, at a truck stop, and climbs off the bus to buy an oddly bitter breakfast sandwich and an even worse black coffee that could be diesel fuel, she really wouldn’t be able to tell you. She pours about half of it out, and drowns it in creamer, milk, and sugar, hoping for something resembling a latte, and gets back on the bus. Her seat partner is still the same woman from last night, who has pulled out bright purple yarn and is rapidly knitting some sort of a scarf. The lady pulls her knees up and smiles at Noa, although it looks more like a leer than anything else.  
“I’m going to visit my cousin. She just had a baby.”  
Noa nods, slowly, not wanting to be rude, but wanting the conversation to be over. She puts her earbuds back in and picks up a book, one of the random ones that she grabbed from the used section of the store before she left, hoping that maybe Marissa wouldn’t notice until after she was gone.  
Thinking of Marissa just makes her think of Will and Édith, though, and what they must be doing right now.  
Have they woken up yet? Are they worried about her? Have they noticed that she’s gone? Did they get home okay?  
She pulls out her phone to check for messages, but thinks better of it and puts it away. It might be best not to look, for now. She doesn’t trust herself to ask the bus to just drop her off right then and there, and hitch a ride back home. She misses them already.  
She can get through this, though. She doesn’t need to worry about them. They probably stayed overnight at the party. Édith is probably still sleeping right now, and when she wakes up, she’s going to have a nice breakfast with Nick, and he’s going to drive her home.  
He’s good for her. Noa thinks. I hope they do okay.  
She resolutely doesn’t think about how final that sounds, about how that makes it sound like she isn’t going to find out how they do. She’s going to find out. She’s allowed to contact them.  
Will refuses to get up for anything less than a complete disaster or the arrival of midday. They stay overnight at a party unless someone is there to drag them away, or there’s a better one a few blocks south.  
Noa knows this. She knows that they are still asleep, on somebody’s couch or spare bed or available inch of carpeted floor, if the carpet is soft enough. They tend to sprawl, to have to be shaken awake, to need a metric ton of coffee in order to function.  
Noa doesn’t miss shaking them awake. She does kind of miss cooking for the two of them and hearing them trade stories about how the night went, who did what, whether or not Chris actually flashed the police officer and how did Janice manage not to get arrested for public intoxication and did Emm really hook up with her ex again because he’s an asshole and she deserves better.  
Noa stopped going to the parties, pretty much, so she barely knows most of these people, gets to know them through the wild stories from the next day and the grainy photos taken on Édith’s phone because she always manages to appoint herself as the party’s photographer.  
It’s always a shock, too, when she meets these people in real life and only knows them from endless stories about the other dumb thing that they did last time they were shitfaced, or the lengths that they went to in order to meet their favorite band.  
She wouldn’t be getting those stories for another few hours, yet, but she would be getting them. She feels her phone buzz, and looks at the notification without actually opening it.  
“You’ll never believe what Stef did last night.” This from Will, who is up earlier than usual. Another one comes in quick succession.  
“Be home soon.”  
The lump in Noa’s throat is back now in full force, although it feels more like a dagger. She doesn’t turn her phone off, just stares at the screen. One more comes through.  
“Love you.”  
And this is a normal text, the kind that they send back and forth every day, just checking in, just making sure that everything is alright, just reaching out a little bit. It’s the kind of thing that she gets every single day.  
The normalcy of it is what finally makes her cry. She cries quietly, looking out the window so that maybe nobody will see her, nobody will notice. She wishes that she could disappear, or teleport, or make this trip go faster. They pull into another stop, to refuel and let people off. Her seat mate gets up, and hands her a pack of tissues.  
“Good luck getting where you need to be.” The woman smiles at her, and her crow’s feet remind Noa of her mother. She cries harder. The woman rolls up her knitting, and shoves it into her bag. Before she goes, Noa speaks up.  
“Have fun with your cousin.”  
The lady looks surprised, a little bit, but she smiles over her shoulder as she walks off of the bus.  
Noa really can’t stop crying, and it’s not until they pull into the final stop that she realizes she’s cried herself out. She cleans up a bit with the last tissue in the pack that the knitting lady had given her, shoves everything back into her backpack, and walks off of the bus. She has one more leg of the trip, and an hour of doing nothing before the next bus comes. In that hour, she decides to get lunch, and walks to the nearest restaurant, which happens to be a Denny’s.  
It’s mostly empty, with a few elderly patrons, one of which is arguing at the waitress, who looks tired. Noa smiles at her and makes up her mind to leave a good tip. She slides into a booth, and pulls her knees up to her chest.  
It’s a grey kind of day, and chillier here than it was in California. She realizes that the further she goes, the colder it’s going to be, and digs through her suitcase to find her winter coat, both as a blanket for the bus and because she knows that she’s going to need it when she gets home.  
She orders some pancake and eggs and sausage conglomerate dish that sounds entirely unappetizing, hoping that they’ll give her a box, and knowing it’s going to be better than anything she’ll be able to get on the next bus ride, which is even longer than the first.  
Her phone buzzes again. The new texts, the ones that she’s been ignoring for the past half hour, are worried, wondering where the hell are you? And when are you coming home?  
She turns her phone off. The waitress gives her a thin smile. The elderly guy from before snaps at her. She pretends she can’t hear him.  
“Do you need me to pretend to make conversation with you?” Noa asks, hating the sound of her own voice after not having used it much in what feels like days.  
The waitress smiles. “Now if only I could sit down, too.”  
“Anything to avoid that guy. What’s his issue?”  
She sighs and runs a hand through her hair, tightening her ponytail as she speaks.  
“I can’t seem to get anything right today. And I forgot to warm his maple syrup.”  
“An unacceptable offense by anyone’s standards.”  
The girl laughs, at least, and when he ends up bellowing across the restaurant and she has to go back over, she smiles at him patiently while he complains about today’s youth and how awful she is.  
Noa doodles in her notebook while she’s eating, not realizing how hungry that she is until the food comes.  
She spends longer than she means to in the restaurant, and leaves the biggest tip that she can afford when she goes.  
The waitress waves at her on the way out. She waves back, trips over her own feet, and has to sprint in order to catch the bus.  
She sits down in the first row, right behind the driver, and tucks her backpack under her feet, feeling better than she has in days.  
It’s a wonder what a good meal can do.  
She opens her laptop and settles in. It’s going to be a long ride.

Chapter 5: Édith  
Édith isn’t Noa. She doesn’t live for a routine, and she doesn’t love it when every day is the same as the last. That being said, she’s really enjoying the way that her life has ended up going recently. She likes the routine of waking up on the morning after a party, stretching, walking off to find Nick, and having him drive her to somewhere she’s never been just to eat at some tiny place she’s never heard of.  
It’s nice to have a quiet morning after a crazy night. Today’s diner is themed, with Broadway paraphernalia all over the walls, and comfortable plush booths, and an honest-to-god counter with the chairs that spin when you sit on them. She doesn’t actually want to sit at the counter, but she does sit on a chair for a moment just to try spinning around, just so she can feel like she’s in a movie.  
Nick teases her about it. The pancakes are good. Her head doesn’t hurt.  
It’s all pretty normal.  
He takes her home, and when she reaches the door she realizes that she’s forgotten her keys somewhere. She decides to just worry about it later, and knocks on the door. Will answers, wrenching the door open.  
“Noa?”  
Édith steps inside, confused. “Édith. Isn’t Noa here?”  
Will shakes their head frantically. “She didn’t answer any of my texts. I think her phone is off.”  
“Maybe she’s just getting food or off drawing or something?” Édith suggests. “She probably just forgot to charge her phone. Calm down.”  
Will continues to shake their head. “She never forgets to charge her phone. And I don’t think she was here when I got home, either.”  
“When did you get home?”  
Will rubs their face slowly, looking worried. “Early this morning, I think. I just figured she was asleep and went right to bed and she wasn’t here when I woke up.”  
Édith shakes her head. “I’m sure it’s fine. Let’s just give it a few hours and then call her if she isn’t back by then. I’m sure it’s nothing.”  
Édith regrets this a few hours later. Noa still isn’t back, Will hasn’t stopped panicking, and after calling and texting multiple times they have no idea where she could possibly be. Édith calls Nick in a panic, and he comes over to a pacing Will and Édith sitting at the kitchen table worrying over a pot of soup. It seemed like the right kind of thing to do. It’s 70 degrees and sunny outside, and she’s cooking soup. It’s not fine.  
The soup boils out of the pot when she gets up to get the door, and she dumps it into the sink, frustrated. Nick has brought Kevin along, and he talks quietly to Will in English so Édith can explain to Kevin in French. Édith wants to kiss him for being so thoughtful. She also wants to cry. Mostly, though, she wants Noa to come home and tease her for how bad her soup is and how she didn’t spice it properly, anyway. Édith pulls some calm out of the fridge, the kind that she always keeps on hand just in case, and pours out two cups, one for Will and one for herself.  
She sits down with Kevin and explains the problem, and his frown gets deeper with every sentence.  
“What are some places that she could be?” he asks.  
“Literally anywhere.” Édith says, trying to make him understand, but he shakes his head.  
“That’s not going to help anything.”  
“Well then what do you suggest?” Édith can feel herself lashing out, but she thinks it’s pretty justified under the circumstances.  
“We need to be logical about this. What are the places that she liked to spend time in? Where did she go to be alone? Where did she go, in general?”  
Édith wants to snap at him for his use of past tense, but the calm is setting in, and she starts making a mental list because it’s easier than forcing herself to fight. Will has stopped pacing, although they still look like they’re on the verge of tears.  
After thinking for a couple minutes, during which Kevin has pulled out a pen and paper, she starts listing off possible places.  
“She tries to work as much as possible, so maybe she’s at the store? There are about 10 cafes that I know she goes to on a regular basis and a couple of parks within walking distance. There’s also that one used bookstore that she likes.”  
“Could she be in the record store?” Kevin suggests gently, but without much optimism in his voice.  
“I doubt it.” Édith says. “But we should look anyway.”  
Kevin looks down at the list that he’s scribbled. It isn’t very long, but it’s a place to start. He smiles at Édith and she smiles back, if a bit shakily.  
He calls over to Nick and Will, who join them.  
Will adds magic lessons to the list. Nick puts his arm around Édith’s shoulder and looks worried.  
They split up into two groups, Édith going reluctantly with Kevin as she’s struggling with explaining herself at the moment and needs a translator just in case. Will goes with Nick, dragging her feet like she’s forgotten how to walk properly.  
The four of them cover all of the locations within walking distance, and a few that require a bus ride, intermittently texting Noa along the way. She doesn’t respond. They try not to panic, again, and it still doesn’t work. The calm stops working. Nick and Kevin have a quick discussion before informing Édith that they’re going to stay overnight.  
They sit up in the apartment, worrying, having exhausted their ideas. Will puts on a movie that nobody but they watch, and even they keep looking up at the door every few minutes, still expecting Noa to walk through at any moment.  
None of them are aware that they’ve fallen asleep.  
When Édith wakes up the next morning, there’s bright light shining on her face, and she stretches slowly and looks around before remembering everything that happened yesterday and wrenching herself up to look around the apartment. Noa still hasn’t come back.  
Édith is starting to wonder if she was kidnapped, or something. The only other person up is Kevin, who looks about as tired as Édith feels, if not more. He looks at her and opens his mouth like he wants to say something, then closes it again.  
Édith is confused. He sighs.  
“I want to wait for Will to wake up first.”  
“Why? Do you know something? Did she contact you?” Édith is suddenly fully awake. “Is she alright? Was she kidnapped? Is she somewhere safe?”  
Kevin shakes his head.  
“That’s not an answer.” She can hear how frantic she sounds, can feel herself being irritating, but she has to know. She has to know.  
She goes and shakes Will awake, Kevin making a vague motion to stop her. Will pulls the blanket back over themself, groaning, but Édith pulls it off.  
“Kevin knows something! Wake up.” This doesn’t seem to register with Will until she says it multiple times, but when it does, they jump up, suddenly awake, and run the three steps that it takes to get across the apartment to stare at Kevin.  
“What do you know?” They ask, looking more intense than Édith has ever seen them. Kevin shakes his head.  
“Nothing certain, just a hunch.”  
“Don’t do that. It’s too fucking early.” Will is on the verge of yelling, and so is Édith. Nick wakes up.  
“What’s going on?”  
“Kevin knows something!” She and Will practically scream in unison. Kevin sighs, looking more tired, if that’s possible.  
“I’ll tell you as soon as you let me get a word in.” He says quietly, exasperated.  
Everyone falls silent.  
“Édith, how long have you known Noa?”  
“Like a year, why?”  
“When last year did you meet her?”  
“Around this time, probably.”  
“And why did Noa go to Paris in the first place?”  
“It was part of her year, you know that, but what does this…” It dawns on her, suddenly, and she has to sit down. “Oh.”  
Will is looking angrier than ever, but Kevin and Nick are both nodding.  
“I don’t understand.” They say.  
Nick turns to them, and says gently. “Will, Noa’s year is up. She went home.”  
Will crumples in on themself, looking just as tiny as the day that Édith found them under the table.  
“Oh.”  
Édith knows that she must look pretty much the same as Will. It’s not like she didn’t know at some level, at least, that Noa’s year had to end at some point, but she wasn’t expecting it to be this soon.  
Kevin and Nick leave a few minutes later, knowing that there isn’t much that they can do at this point. Will is crying. Édith is trying not to.  
At first, it felt like being punched in the stomach. It felt like betrayal, knowing that she had just up and left without bothering to say goodbye or giving them any kind of warning. It felt like betrayal that she left at all.  
But Noa never stopped talking about her family, the whole year through. Sometimes she would make food and then not eat it because it made her too sad. Édith saw her reading books in Spanish, or watching tv shows. Once she asked her if she liked them, and Noa had shaken her head, but said that she had to be caught up or her grandmother would make her listen to a rundown of everything that happened while she was gone.  
So Édith always kind of knew that this year wouldn’t last, and that Noa was going to go back home, but it was one of those things that she just didn’t think about because the idea of anything changing from how it was hurt too much.  
Édith knew that she was using Noa and Will as a surrogate family. She knew that it was stupid to trust anyone this much, or to get too close to them, because it’s never worked out all that well for her. She should have known that this was coming. She should have expected Noa to just leave, after seeing her planning to do just that back when they lived with Thea. She hasn’t thought about Thea in weeks.  
That’s her real family, though. They still exist. Édith shouldn’t need some kind of a replacement. Noa clearly didn’t care enough to think of them that way.  
But then there’s Will. Édith looks over to them, curled up on one of the beds, paging through one of the books that Noa’s left behind. Will’s lost everything more recently. They got to go home at the end of their year, too. They left much later.  
Both of them had the chance to come home that Édith never got. Will took it, but it didn’t work out. Noa is lucky enough to have a chance for it to be okay. Édith can’t blame her, as angry as she was even a few minutes ago.  
Noa deserves a normal family. It’s not her responsibility to try and turn Will and Édith into some kind of fucked-up replacement, no matter if that’s what Will and Édith have managed to do.  
She deserves to go.

Chapter 6: Noa  
Noa’s legs are beyond asleep, wherever that is. She’s transcended time zones into tiny 5-hour days, each of which contains an hour of sleep and a single meal. When the driver announces that the next stop is Milwaukee, she can’t fall back asleep, feeling her leg start to bounce and her heart rate going up.  
It’s an hour left to get there, give or take, and another bus, and a long walk home, but sometime around the middle of the ride, she realizes, they drove into winter. She stares out the window, watching the vast empty spaces covered in snow, and fixes her gaze on a point in the distance. She reads every road sign they drive past. She counts the number of blue houses. The hour passes slower than any hour has ever passed before, but even so, when they reach the stop, she isn’t really prepared to gather up all of her stuff and get off the bus.  
She feels almost connected to her seat, and it’s a bit weird to gather all the mess that she’s spread around her, shove it into her backpack, and step onto the street. For a minute, she thinks that her legs won’t hold her, that maybe her muscles have atrophied in the time since she last stood up.  
The station looks the same as she remembers it, sort of, although last time she was pretty terrified and not very awake.  
The last bus that she catches takes her another hour and a half to get there, going painfully slow. They run into traffic and Noa grits her teeth every time they slow down, every time that another car drives past them. She wants to get up and scream at the driver to hurry it up a bit, but instead she just vibrates out of her seat, accidentally waking up the guy next to her, who looks huffy and moves to another row. She calls out an apology, not sure if it sounds cheerful or strained, as her voice sounds odd and far-off.  
She doesn’t really know how to feel.  
She wishes that Édith was in the seat next to her. She wishes that Will was the one vibrating, that she was the one telling them to stop.  
She pulls out her headphones, but doesn’t listen to any music. When the bus pulls in, they’re still curled loosely in her hands.  
The station gives her the worst feeling of déjà vu that she’s ever had. She finds the bench that she slept on, and sits down on it. She expects something to have changed this time around.  
She’s less scared than she was last time. She’s marginally less confused.  
She really wants this to be more of a profound moment than it’s turning out to be. It’s a bench.  
It’s still a bench. The bench didn’t change over the year.  
She pulls on her hat, but she never managed to replace her gloves, so she just shoves her hands in her pockets and hops from one foot to another, trying to remember which way she should start walking. She doesn’t want to ask for directions, she wants to remember.  
Noa sets off down a random road, hoping that maybe her feet will remember what her head can’t recall.  
She makes it home. Her house is the same as when she left: covered in snow, small, faded blue. The door was repainted recently. There’s a bike frozen to the porch.  
She stands outside, staring at it.  
She spent a lot of time daydreaming about coming home, about what it would be like to walk through the door and be wrapped up in tight hugs and get to taste her mom’s cooking and hope that her sister would pull herself off of her phone for long enough to say more than just hello.  
Noa gathers up her courage and shifts the backpack on her shoulders, weighing down on her pretty heavily after the long walk she had to take to get there. She opens the gate and drags the suitcase down the cracked walkway, up the porch steps, and knocks.  
No answer.  
She knocks again, harder. Still nothing.  
She remembers that she’s allowed to call the house phone now, and does so. She stands outside, shifting from foot to foot, shivering. She can hear the phone ring. She calls her sister.  
She picks up the phone, thank the lord.  
“Hello?”  
“Noa?”  
“Yeah.” She wants to cry, it’s been so long since she’s heard her voice. “I’m outside the house.”  
She can hear her sister yelling to the rest of the family for a second before she comes back on.  
“We’re all at abuela’s. Do you wanna walk over? Mom says she can come and pick you up.”  
“No, I can walk.” Noa says thickly, wiping her eyes. I’ll be there soon.”  
“Do you remember how to get there?” She asks.  
Noa realizes that she has absolutely no idea anymore, and her sister reels off directions.  
“…and then it’s on the left.”  
“Got it.”  
“Walk fast, Mom is freaking out. Bye.”  
“Love you.”  
Noa just wants to hear her say it back, but she’s already hung up. Breathing in deeply, Noa drags her bag back out onto the sidewalk, shoves her hands in her pockets, and starts to walk, taking in the sights on the way.  
It’s the late afternoon. There are kids outside, and some of the houses have up their Christmas lights already. She pulls her hood tighter around her face, wondering what her mother told the neighbors to excuse her absence.  
As she walks, she sees all of the things that she’s managed to forget. The Johnson’s house, with the tiny castle in the front yard that they still haven’t gotten rid of even though their kids barely fit inside anymore. She watched their kids every Saturday in eighth grade, until their daughter decided that she was too old and mature to have a babysitter.  
Mrs. May’s house, the one that you can’t miss because she’s decorated for every holiday that you can think of. There’s a whole flock of plastic turkeys on her lawn, and some caved-in pumpkins left over from Halloween are sitting on her stoop.  
She finds her grandmother’s house, looking the same as it did when she left, sitting comfortable on the corner of Clover Street. It’s a squat grey house with one floor and three TV satellite dishes on the roof, one more than the last time she was here. There’s a new patch of wood covering up one corner of the house, and Noa wonders if something caved in.  
Her grandmother’s bushes are covered in snow, and there’s three cars in the driveway, two of which she’s never seen before. She walks up to the house, and knocks timidly.  
The door opens wide, her mother’s face is in front of her, waves of heat coming out.  
Before she can say anything, she’s wrapped up in a massive hug.  
She’s crying again, and so is her mother.  
Her sister has to close the door, because the two of them can’t do anything but stand there, holding on to each other.  
Her sister gives her a quick hug and whispers “Wait until mom calms down enough to notice your hair.”  
Noa laughs through her tears. She goes to hug her grandfather first, who pats her on the back, gruffly happy, and then her abuela, who hugs her tight and strokes her hair and tells her that she can’t wait to hear about all that she’s done.  
She sits down on the couch, sinking in, and the first thing that she can think to say once she’s managed to stop crying is just, “I forgot how nice couches are.”  
Everyone looks confused. She doesn’t know how to explain herself. It’s not like she hasn’t sat on a couch for a year, she just spent most of her time for the past few months either sitting on a mattress or on a counter or standing up working.  
She doesn’t want to explain all of this, so instead she just laughs at herself and says, “the place where I lived didn’t have any couches.”  
Her sister wrinkles her nose. “What kind of a place doesn’t have couches?”  
Her mother gives her sister a bit of a glare. “Be polite, Andrea.”  
She lets out a huffy breath. Noa laughs.  
“All we had were mattresses, Andrea.”  
“Oh.” She says. “Were you poor or something? I thought mom gave you money.”  
Noa wants to cry with frustration, a little bit. Not much has changed with the whole family dynamic situation since she left.  
Then her father walks into the room. He looks surprised.  
“Noa? I didn’t realize you were here already.”  
Noa doesn’t move to get up, just nods at him.  
“I’m here.”  
“It’s good to see you.”  
“You too.” She says, in as much of a monotone as she can manage, trying to imitate the way that Édith sounds whenever anyone asks her to do something she isn’t interested in. Her mother squeezes her hand, but doesn’t say anything.  
Her abuela breaks the tense silence.  
“What was the last thing you ate?”  
Noa tries to remember what it was, and comes up with nothing but chips and the like for a minute, before answering, “Pancakes, I think.”  
Her grandmother shakes her head, making a noise of disapproval.  
“Come with me. Let’s get you some real food. There are leftovers in the refrigerator.”  
She pulls Noa into the kitchen and dishes her a full plate.  
“I’m really not that hungry, abuela.”  
“Nonsense, mija.”  
“I don’t need that much food.”  
Abuela shakes her head, making the same noise of disapproval that she made in the living room.  
“I haven’t been able to feed you for a whole year, Noa. Of course you need this much food. Eat.”  
She sits down on the stool in the corner of the kitchen and hands Noa her plate. Noa does as she’s told, and eats.

Chapter 6: Édith  
Édith knows which bed is hers. She also knows which bed is Will’s. She knows how many more hours she has to work in order to make rent with one less person paying. She knows that Friday nights are better when she doesn’t drink, but that she does in anyway because it feels like the right thing at the time. She knows that Saturday mornings are the best times in her week.  
She knows that her second job makes ends meet, but that she really didn’t miss being a barista. She still can’t fathom why Americans have so many obnoxiously named complicated sweet drinks that she has to memorize how to say as well as how to make.  
She doesn’t know why Noa didn’t bother to stay in touch. She doesn’t know why she stopped responding to texts unless it’s 10 hours later. She doesn’t know how to keep the friendship up this long-distance.  
Nick asks her if she’d like to take a break, because they don’t have enough time to see each other. She insists that she can make time. He gets a job at the bookstore, and gets fired within a week for picking a fight with a customer who makes fun of Édith’s English. She tells him it happens all the time, and he tells her that it shouldn’t. She kisses him so she can’t see how sad she thinks she must look, and wishes that he isn’t quite so thoughtful. She daydreams about moving back to France. It’s kind of exhausting to live in a place where you have to translate everything in your head before you can say it, although it does allow her to guard her thoughts more carefully.  
Will is despondent. They stop going to classes without telling Édith, and she gets so angry that she can’t speak and has to get Kevin to translate what she says through gritted teeth.  
They go back to school, and come home one day with a black cat, insisting that it’s a witch’s staple and they need a familiar in order to do magic properly. The cat sits on Édith’s lap when she’s trying to read and wakes her up in the morning and they have to spend precious money to buy food and litter. Édith loves it immediately. Will starts practicing their powers again. They force themselves through to the end of the semester.  
Noa never texts back. Édith stops trying. She’s okay, here. Sometimes she’ll see a brand of tea in the grocery store and put it in the cart before remembering there’s nobody there to drink it, and want to write to Noa, but she doesn’t.  
Noa doesn’t write to her, either.  
Neither one wants to admit how much they miss the other.  
But they’re both okay.  
It’s not awful.


End file.
